"Cafe Corbeau" by Keith Harvey

Café Corbeau

The pigeon-the hawk-the nez bourbon--table for two-the roost


Felix Beinix awoke to the sound of the green garbage trucks entering the square, known as Place Triangle, an ancient neighborhood located between the Sorbonne on the south and the Seine on the north.

The green trucks were usually the first sound he heard each morning. The second was the city employees hosing down the street, cleaning the detritus from the night before, forcing it into the drains and the sewers and ultimately into the river. The third was Madame Fouchard winding the awnings open over the windows and door of her boulangerie or Monsieur Bleyer opening the automatic metal shutters over the door to his patisserie. The fourth was the sound of the storeowners scrubbing down the sidewalks, washing away pigeon droppings.

It was spring and Beinix’s apartment windows were open and he could hear all these familiar sounds, sounds he had listened to for the last twenty years. Today, however, there was a new sound, one he had not yet gotten use to. It was the sound of a congress of crows, which had decided to make the trees of the park, which occupied the center of the Place Triangle, their roost.

He owned a bar and cafe and the building that housed them on the Place Triangle. The building consisted of five stories with two apartments on each of the four stories above the ground, where the bar and café were situated.

Felix’s father left him the bar and café. When his father died, Felix had been in Southeast Asia, flying a helicopter for the French Navy. No one could remember who was the first Beinix to own the building. It had been passed from father to son for centuries.

The building was constructed of granite and some stonemason had placed a gargoyle on each corner of the building. At one time the building had been called the Corbeau and that name was still carved in the stone above the door, leading into the apartment building.

Felix’s father had named the café/bar-Café Corbeau.

The family believed that when the Beinix family was Celt, they called themselves Corbeau. The Romans, however, made them change their name and they chose Beinix.
He lay quietly, identifying each sound, before he kicked off the covers of the bed and swung his legs to the floor.

He looked at his legs and noted how thin they were and he remembered the muscles he used to have when he was young. He stood up and walked to the bathroom and paused in front of a mirror and examined his nude body. His stomach was flat but his arms and legs seemed thin and frail, although he was not aware of any loss of strength. He was still able to hoist the cases of wine and liquor out of the delivery vans and sweep the bar and mop the floor and polish the copper fittings and clean the mirrors.

There was something birdlike about his body and he often imagined that he was a starling, although he couldn’t sing or fly. It was just a fantasy he had. He tended to see all people as a type of animal.

In addition to his belief that all people were somehow connected to an animal, he agreed with Hemingway that a bar should be a clean well-lit place, where people could sit and read or write over their cognac. He purposely created such a place for such people and, as a result of his plan or fantasy that was usually the type of patrons that visited his place on the Place Triangle.

He shaved his thick black beard carefully with a straight razor and then showered. Later, he walked about his large apartment that was directly above his bar, straightening it up from last night. He was an insomniac and after closing the bar he usually read or watched television and wandered around the apartment. In the morning, he picked up newspapers, glasses, and books, made the bed, watered the plants, fed his two finches, cleaned their cage and then dressed.

He wore the same thing every day- a white cotton shirt that he ironed himself, black woolen slacks, and Italian loafers with a tassel. He combed his thick hair straight back and he examined himself one more time in front of the mirror. He checked the time. It was eight forty five, the time he opened the back door for his two morning employees-Marie-France Rosier and Guillermo de la Peña.

He walked down the narrow wooden steps that led from the hall of the first floor to the back door of the ground floor. The stairs were dark and he descended them slowly. Since he turned fifty he had become concerned about falls. For some reason he felt fragile, although his looks had not really changed in ten years.

The stairs ended in a foyer where there were three doors. One door led to the building’s lobby. Another opened onto the back alley and the third served as the back entrance to the Corbeau. He unlocked the door to the alley and Guillermo immediately pushed against it. Felix jumped back to avoid being hit and the Spaniard entered with a big grin on his face. Felix wondered why he was always happy.

“Hola, Felix, “ said Guillermo pushing past him.

Guillermo was twenty-seven years old, tall and thin, with a week old growth of black stubble on his thin face, and long blue-black hair that hung to his shoulders. He wore a white T-shirt and a pair of American jeans and red tennis shoes. He carried a backpack slung over his right shoulder and when he smiled Felix was always startled by the whiteness of his teeth.

“Ça va? mon copain?” asked Felix.

“Si, Si.”

Guillermo hung his backpack on a peg on the wall of the back hall and then followed Felix to the front, turning on lights as he walked.

Once inside the café, Guillermo turned toward the kitchen, which was behind a long and elegant copper bar, as Felix unlocked the pad locks on the steel shutters that covered the windows and the door of Café Corbeau.

Once the shutters were up, Felix opened the front door and then rolled out the green awning and set up five tables in the front of the restaurant.

Students on their way to school passed by and called out greetings to Felix, while he watched the patrons line up in front of the patisserie next door.

In the small park in the center of the Place, several men sat on wooden benches patiently waiting for Felix to wave them in. These men appeared every morning and would sit and drink cognac as they read their papers and talked politics. Most of them were in their sixties but some were seventy or eighty. They were friends of his father and his grandfather. They were pensioners and widowers and veterans and Felix’s bar and café was their refuge from the loneliness of their lives.

This morning Felix noted that the trees of the park were full of crows. Over the past few weeks, crows, black birds and ravens had decided to make the trees in the Place Triangle into their rookery. Felix felt a strange attraction to them but sometimes their incessant sounds, machine like in their quality and consistency, were annoying. The only bright spot was that, unlike the pigeons, the crows were usually gone by the time he opened the bar and they did not return until the evening.

Some of the people on the Place had complained to the city and several inspectors had appeared and noted the unusual congress of the crows. The city responded by hanging several painted wooden owls from high limbs in the trees but these owls for all their verisimilitude did not seem to have an effect on the birds.

Over the last few weeks Felix suspected that the crows were waiting for something. After all, they had never been there before and he could see no rhyme or reason for their appearance now. Other than several alders, oaks, and ashes in the petite park there was nothing there that would attract a crow.

At eight fifty five, Marie-France appeared on the back of her boyfriend’s BMW. Once upon the curb, she pulled off her black helmet and attached it to the seat of the bike, kissed François on each cheek and then turned to Felix, who she kissed three times.

He looked at his watch and said, “just barely.”

“You know I am never late. It was such a nice morning that we stayed in bed a little longer.” She winked at him.

She had thick curly blonde hair, brown eyes and brown skin. She was short and a little plump. She was his day waitress and she could cover the whole bar and café without breaking a sweat during its busiest times. She wore the same outfit as Felix, a white cotton shirt, black woolen slacks and flat black shoes.

As he followed her into the bar, he smelled fresh coffee brewing and saw that Guillermo had pulled his chef’s hat on and was wearing a white smock with his name initialed on his left breast.
Pierre Londais entered, carrying an armful of baguettes from the boulangerie across the Place. Pierre’s arrival always signaled the workday had started.

At nine thirty, Felix was setting the tables outside when he felt a blow to his shoulder, causing him to fall over a chair and hit his head against the pavement. For a moment he lost consciousness.

When he came to, after only a moment, he discovered Marie-France holding his head in her lap.

“He’s awake,” she said, and several people standing around him expressed their happiness that he was still alive.

“What happened?”

“You were hit on the head by a pigeon.”

“What?"

“A pigeon fell from the sky and hit you.”

To prove her point Mathieu, one of younger pensioners, held a dead pigeon up to his face.

“My God.”

“Can you stand?” asked Marie-France.

“I believe so.”

He stood up carefully and reached behind his head and felt a large knot. He noted that a few drops of blood were on his fingers.

“ Should we get you to a doctor?” asked Mathieu.

“No, I’ll be all right.” He hated doctors and hospitals. “I would rather die than go to a doctor.

Several people helped him inside to the bar, where Guillermo poured him a small glass of cognac.

The pensioners must have thought that his glass of cognac signaled that the bar was open because they followed him in and took up their usual places around the café.

“You might as well start serving them,” he said to Marie-France. “I’ll be all right.”

She examined him closely, trying to decide whether she should believe him or not.

Mathieu put the dead bird next to him on the bar.

At ten o’clock the Corbeau began to fill up with students and teachers from the Sorbonne. One regular, Marc de la Croix, a history professor, who appeared every day, sat at his usual table near the window and ordered a croissant, a cappuccino, and a cognac.

Professor de La Croix was a stocky man in his early forties. He had ruddy cheeks and thick blond hair that cascaded off his round head. He usually wore a brown suit, with a yellow shirt and a paisley bowtie.

When de la Croix entered today he said good morning to Felix as he always did but he paused for a moment and examined the pigeon. He did not ask why the dead bird rested on the bar nor did he comment on the fact that Felix’s shirt was stained with blood. He simply took his usual seat and ordered.

After a while, Felix went up stairs, washed his face, doctored the bump on his head, took an aspirin and changed his shirt. When he returned, the bar was full and he took his place at the door, where he greeted guests, made out their checks and took their money.

He noticed that someone had removed the pigeon.

At noon, a new woman walked through the door. She reminded Felix of the crows in the trees in the Place. She was tall, almost as tall as Felix, with black eyes and long black hair that she had braided. She possessed a nez bourbon, a racial characteristic of the old French aristocracy that Felix found irresistible. She wore a white silk blouse, a black leather mini skirt, and flat shoes. She carried a weathered leather briefcase and she smelled like chocolate and musk.

“Table for two?” she asked.

“Outside or in?”

“Outside, please. In the shade.”

“There was only one table available but it was in the sun. Felix went to the back and brought out a large green umbrella, which he set up in such a way that the table was now in the shade.

He helped her with her seat and as he did he breathed in her perfume and he felt for a moment dizzy.

“May I get you something?”

“A glass of Sauvignon Blanc.”

He hurried inside, poured the glass himself, and took it to her. As he passed Marie-France she gave him a strange look and he simply shrugged.

Mathieu, on his way out, asked, “Did you notice that the pigeon’s breast was ripped out?”

“No.”

“He must have been attacked by one of those hawks that the city has brought in to cut down on the pigeon population.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The city has brought in hundreds of hawks to keep the pigeon population down. It was in Figaro. Of course, there have been several demonstrations at l'Assemblée Nationale on behalf of the pigeons.

As soon as Mathieu left, Felix asked Guillermo, “Where’s the pigeon?”

He looked up from the omelet he was preparing and pointed to the back.

Felix went down the hall to the back door and then into the alley where the large trash containers were. He opened theirs and examined the dead pigeon that lay on top of a pile of potato peels.

Mathieu was right, he thought, the breast of the pigeon had been ripped from its body.

He walked back through the café and out onto the sidewalk, then crossed the street and entered the small park through a black wrought iron fence. Standing under the trees he examined his building. At the top, perched on top of one of the gargoyles was a hawk, the killer of the pigeon.

As he crossed the street he realized that the crows were gone. They must have left while he was unconscious.

As he passed the woman’s table, he asked, “Would you like another glass of wine?”

She looked up from her book and he was struck once again by the blackness of her eyes.

“Yes.”

“Should I remove this place setting?”

“No, my friend is coming. He is always late.”

De la Croix beckoned him to his table.

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know. I have never seen her before.”

“She’s a beautiful woman. Look at that nose. She must have Bourbon blood. It is magnificent. You know what Freud would say about that nose?”

“No. But she is attractive. She possesses the old French looks and grace.”

“For men like us, Beinix, that look is irresistible.”

“Men like us?”

“Men with the old Gallic blood.”

As they admired the woman, a tall man, with dark skin and black hair approached her table. He was tall and powerfully built, with hooded eyes and a nose like a hawk’s beak.

He wore leather pants and boots, a red silk shirt, dark glasses, a silver bracelet on each wrist and silver earrings in each ear. When he reached her table he bent down and kissed the woman on each cheek and then pulled out his chair and moved it closer to her.

Felix excused himself and raced Marie-France to their table to ask the man if he wanted something to drink.

The man ordered a cognac and an espresso.

Felix let Marie-France serve them. While he stood behind the bar and watched them, he guessed that they were not lovers because the woman tensed up, when the man kissed her.

The couple ate and then talked for another hour. Sometimes their voices rose and Felix watched them carefully from a distance. He had not been caught in such a snare for a long time. He was trapped by the woman’s looks and smell.

At two thirty the two stood, kissed briefly, and then left. The man walked toward the Sorbonne, while the woman turned and walked into the park. Felix assumed that she would pass through the park and emerge on the other side of the Place and take the short street that led to the Seine.

They closed the kitchen at three and Guillermo left. Marie-France would stay until five, when the evening shift would arrive. Felix cleaned all the tables and then he and Marie-France placed cloth tablecloths on the tables and set them for dinner.

The bar area stayed open all day.

At four thirty Felix returned to his room, undressed and lay down for a two-hour nap. He left the windows open and listened to pigeons cooing on the ledge outside his window.

While he slept he dreamed that the woman in the café came to him and offered him a square bar of peat, which he held in his hands like some sacred object. As she was handing it to him, he smelled her perfume and she leaned toward him and he kissed her on each cheek and he felt excited and safe.

At six thirty his alarm went off and he showered and shaved and then walked downstairs.

Robert Levy, the night chef, stood in the kitchen, talking with Tasco, his assistant, a short, dark Sicilian, and Laurence, the waitress, was standing at the bar listening to Professor de la Croix.

Felix heard him say, “the Keltoi or the hidden people once ruled this land but they were conquered by the Romans and driven out by other tribes. They worshipped their gods in sacred groves and sometimes identified themselves by a tree."

“They had their own calendars and this time of the year would be associated with the alder and the hawk.”

“Why animals and trees?”

“They were close to nature and associated their own qualities with those of the animals and trees around them.”

With his dream still fresh in his mind, Felix asked the Professor, “Do you know what peat is?”

“Of course, it is the early formation of coal. It consists of dead vegetation, insects, sometimes-decaying bodies, waste, and water. It is sometimes used as fuel by people in rural areas.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I had a dream, where a woman handed me a block of peat.”

The professor started to laugh. “I think that I would reassess that relationship.”

“Me, too,” said Laurence.

Felix glared at her and she jumped off the stool and walked to the back. Laurence was short and dark and lithe, the opposite of Marie-France. She moved around the café in a hurry and sometimes Felix imagined that she was a sparrow hopping on a ledge or chasing a worm in the garden.

Felix walked out onto the sidewalk and looked up and down the street. The shops were closed and the sun was setting. The crows were returning to their roost and he watched as they flew in over the roofs of the building on the Place Triangle to join the congress.

Laurence came out to join him and said, “We’re full tonight.”

“Good. When is the first reservation?”

“Seven thirty.”

At eight thirty the café was full and both Laurence and Felix were scurrying about servicing the diners. He was standing on the sidewalk pouring the wine for a table of four sitting under one of his green umbrellas when he heard the sound of a scooter close to him and he turned to see the woman from lunch pulling up to the curb astride a red Italian scooter. She wore a black leather mini skirt, black leather flats, a gray silk blouse, and a red helmet.
Without turning off the engine of the scooter, she called out, “do you have a table for me?”
Felix finished pouring the wine and walked to the curb.

“No, we are full but you could eat at the bar.”

“Perfect,” she said and parked her scooter on the sidewalk near the door of the café.

Later, Felix placed a menu in front of her. There was only six items.

“I would like a glass of red.”

“I have a nice Lalande de Pomerol.”

“That and the rabbit.”

He placed her order with Robert and then poured her a glass of the red.

“My name is Felix.”

‘Yes, I know. I am Branwen.”

“Odd name. An old name.”

“As old as they get, Felix.”

She looked at him with a twinkle in her eye before she took a sip of the wine.

“Nice, quite nice.”

“And your friend, does he have an old name?”

“Yes. His name is Horace and his name and blood are very old.”

“A noble, huh.”

She laughed. “Not French. He is an Egyptian.”

Branwen stayed until eleven thirty and Felix walked her to her scooter afterwards.

“I hope you come back?”

“I am moving back into the neighborhood.”

“Back?”

“I used to live here a long time ago. You know that this Place is one of the few sacred spots left in Paris that someone hasn’t built a Cathedral or a mosque on top of. Ages ago it was a sacred grove and we came here to worship but we forgot but now we have remembered and we are coming back. They are trying to stop us of course but they won’t be able to this time. They are not as strong as the Romans; their blood is mixed and their resolve . . ..” She waved her arm absently as if to dismiss the unnamed people.

“What are you talking about?”

“Listen to your blood, brother starling, and you will figure it out.”

She kissed him on each cheek, then pulled on her red helmet and mounted her scooter.
Felix closed the café at one and trudged up the stairs. He did not turn on the lights of the apartment because he did not want to attract mosquitoes and moths to the lights. He undressed completely and sat in a leather chair overlooking the park and the old trees. He heard the crows in the trees and he saw two bats flying around one of the streetlights. Somewhere near by he heard doves cooing. He could not remember this much wildlife in the Place. Maybe this was what she was talking about; maybe she was talking about the return of the birds.

He fell asleep in the chair and he dreamed about her. She was in a great field, walking toward a grove of trees on a nearby hill. She was completely naked but her body was painted blue and green and she wore a crown of silver filigree and on the crown near her temples there were two tiny silver leaves. As she walked her haired flowed behind her and he heard her say. “We are coming back to the sacred places.” And then he saw in the dream hundreds of crows flying out of the north toward the hill and beneath the crows wolves ran and she led them all.
The next morning he woke early, dressed, and crossed the street to the park, where he noticed that the crows had made hundreds of nests in the trees. The crows were waking and preparing to leave their roost and go about their business for the day. They seemed not to notice him as he walked under the trees.

When he walked out of the park on his way back to the café, he saw a hawk land on the head of one of the gargoyles and take up its place. A flock of pigeons burst into the air upon the arrival of the hawk, circle the Place, and then flew off in the direction of Notre Dame, while Felix thought about his dream and the woman.

The End

"The Bite" by Keith Harvey

The Bite

She tattooed his ruddy cheek
with a fatal toothy bite
that resembled a rusty horse’s shoe
and infected his blood with a rabies
so virulent that through his vengeful words
and shaman’s chant
he raised a boar
that gored her side
and burned her blonde fuzz
in a gas chamber assembled
from metallic metaphors
in his English garden.

"The Shaman" by Keith Harvey

The Shaman

The center is in the clay and the clay is in the center.
So he sat in a clearing until the bees stopped and the wasps stopped.
So he sat until rain fell and aspen leaves spun gold.
So he listened until he was heard.

He looked into the lake where the loon lingers.
So he waited until the center opened and the tree’s root pierced his ear’s drum.
So he sat until the bears came and snow fell onto his shoulders.
So he watched until he was seen.

"The Hermit" by Keith Harvey

The Hermit

She found the hermit on the west beach looking for flotsam.
“Love me,” she said. He turned slowly, answering her call,
not because he wanted to love her, that was not in his mind.
He turned because he thought he heard a gull
or a sea lion; those were the things he turned to see.
When he recognized her, he turned away
because the sea frothed white in a strong wind
and the sky masked a somber gray.

'Drow Trees" by Keith Harvey

Drow Trees

On the back of a mule, with hounds at heel
-seven in all-he fled the farm and found a fort.

Hidden within its walls, he exchanged draped denim
for lamb’s wool robes and alchemical arts.

Once he scryed a drow pulling rotten teeth,
planting a pine cone with each tooth.

Beneath a larch he turned to stone.

"The Stranger" by Keith Harvey

The Stranger

They are listed, checked and assigned their place,
one after another through forty years of collecting.
Each one special but the same;
each one a murderer, an executioner, a sadist;
each one a surrogate mother,
who provided milk,
a diversion really from the real quest,
the search for the lost one, the stranger,
who like Talos is molded from red clay
and sandy loam of black woods,
a creature-half man and half bull-
cooked in a canvas tent in a weedy patch
where oil rigs run ragged through the night,
a creature birthed in sweat and blood,
blue bruises and broken noses,
cut from the womb with a broken beer bottle,
who, once found, sits on his Morgan horse
and smokes hand rolled cigarettes
and hums sour tunes about calves and steers.

"Lake Louise" by Keith Harvey

Lake Louise

The bruised clouds seep over the mountain
and frozen rain peppers the purple lake.
Japanese wearing yellow rain suits
flash photos of glacial residue.
A magpie hops on scree,
an aluminum tab in its beak.
A raven watches from a larch.
The tree's roots entrap Thor’s hammer
thrown by tourists
waiting for their bus.

"Last Hike" by Keith Harvey

Last Hike

Singing is her green talent.
We follow her, summer children, up the mountain.
She sings to bears that we are eight,
a sinister number;
her Belfast brogue buzzing like bees.

With steady gait, her bonny head bent,
she stops at a blind bend.
Beckoned, blue-black clouds appear.
She raises her hazel eyes;
her fairy voice fractures frozen air.
A lightening strike and she sings us together,
a brood hen shooing chicks to cover.

It rains, then snows, then clears.
A loon swims alone on a lake.
A silver trout severs its silk surface.
Chipmunks chatter in the heather,
while ravens circle above trees.

I wear a ruby rain suit, a cabiri,
carrying my twin self.
My lungs labor in duplex
against the frugal air,
my knees ache, as my back bends
under the double load of my pack.
I thrill at her voice but pray
the bears do not hear.

We traverse the tree line,
stumbling on geodes and scree.
The sun burns our faces and hands.
No bears in this thin country.
They are below, fat and dark,
eating berries in the shadow of larch and fir-
so intent on their feast they cannot hear
her Irish song.

"Waiting" by Keith Harvey

Waiting

Moss and heather disguise death,
denying past winters’ decay,
casting brown and green
onto the volcanic rock.
Wolf moss clings to the larch.
Fleabane flowers.
Rain darkens the eastern wall;
its frozen drops
pucker the lake’s calm.
A big horn sheep and his ewe
drink; a silver trout
strikes the still surface.
Bear bells tinkle on the pack of some tourist.
Night descends. The moon rises;
its twin lunar face doubles.
The larch needles turn,
as flecks of snow fall.
Summer wanes
as the lone loon waits,
swimming in his singular domination,
scanning the sky for his lost mate.

"Das Wort vom Zur-Tiefe-Gehn" By Paul Celan

I am continuing to wrestle with Paul Celan’s Die Niemandsrose. In a previous post we discussed the first poem of the group-Es War Erde in Ihnen, which on the surface is clearly a reference to the holocaust and his parents’ death. However, there is also a movement toward something-to that unknown other-where a marriage of opposites might occur. This movement toward “marriage” is expressed in the last line of the poem and seems to be the purpose of the poem. From reading his poetry, I believe the movement is toward depth, depth in the sense of psychological depth as set forth in the literature of die Tiefenpsychologie.

The second poem in the sequence-Das Wort vom Zur-Tiefe-Gehn- is more problematic; however, I sense that themes established throughout the work are also here. The poem is quite personal and was written on his anniversary as a gift to his wife. The title refers to a line in a poem by Georg Heym. The title of Celan's poem refers to a direct quote from Heym's poem, where the protagonist asks to be allowed to plunge into the other’s eyes in order to descend to their depth. Here, once again, we have the movement toward the other. And once again we have a movement to the deep/depth of the other through darkness.

The complexity of this short poem arises from the use of a cluster of images involving “word,” “write,” “room,” “deepen,” and “depth.” I believe that Celan is saying that through the “word”-through poetry that they have read together-they have deepened their relationship and this relationship once formed is endless. Through seeing the other through writing they deepen each other in their depth. On one level this is an expression of love from Celan to his wife. On another level it is an expression of love to the unknown other. This unknown other could be God or the Self.

The following translation is mine. I used the German version from Paul Celan, Die Gedichte, Suhrkamp 2003.

The word from To the Depth Goes
that we have read.
The year, the word since then.
We are it still.

You know the room is endless,
you know you do not need to fly,
you know what you have written in your eye
deepens in the depth.

"Talos" by Keith Harvey

Talos

Born below the ash trees,
in their tarnished shadows,
hammered into being
in the heat of the lower level,
half machine, half bull,
he runs, a warden of the isolated isle,
bright in his bronze skin,
three times daily through sugary sand
at the command of his master, the mage.
And in his mechanical gait
he crushes seashells,
his feet whitened by the gulls’ droppings,
singing his forged songs of servitude,
shining on the edge of the surging sea,
scaring sullen seafarers.

Alchemical Images in Celan's "Die Niemandsrose"

Die Niemandsrose by Paul Celan is a progression of poems that expropriates both alchemical images and mystical symbols of the Kabala to express his psychological distress and his return to Jewishness. I believe he was undergoing the suffering associated with the nigredo, the first stage of alchemical psychological transformation. I also believe he had intimations of a successful outcome: the achievement of the philosopher’s stone. However, his experiences and his personality were such that he could only approach the opus alchymicum in a cynical and pessimistic way. In psychological terms, he was undergoing individuation and as part of the process he was returning to, remembering, and evaluating his earlier spiritual influences. This thesis can be shown through a close reading of the first poem of the collection Es war Erde Ihnen. I have explicated this poem in an earlier post but I did not concentrate on the alchemical symbols. In this poem, Celan uses both images of the concentration camp as well as alchemical signals to illustrate a progression or movement through darkness. The subjects of the poem “dig.” On one level they dig their own graves in the earth but on another level the earth is in them and their digging is in the spiritual body. In alchemy, “earth” is one of the four elements and to achieve the earth metaphorically is to obtain or provide "divine service." In Celan’s poem to dig into the earth is not to achieve “divine service,” although he says that God wants it. Instead his or her dig is to “no one.” However, through the digging the “I” approaches the “you.” In other words, through the digging the “I” approaches and resurrects figuratively through language those who died in the concentration camp. Through the language of the poem, the "I" and the "you" draw closer to wholeness. The "I" says und am Finger erwacht uns der Ring. Through the digging, the “I” approaches the “you” and a certain perfection or wholeness is achieved through the use of the symbol of the “ring.” It is a synecdoche expressing mutiple meanings: the circle of life, the marriage of the opposites or the purification ritual, and wholeness.

"Northman" by Keith Harvey

Northman

From the north he flew
and sat still on silent stone,
reading the sky from right to left
until rain runs into the navel below:
green grass,
scree and geodes,
a menhir shifting toward the south
rubbed raw by the weather;
sheep graze among the crystals,
outcroppings spot the scene.
He sits
and sits,
and stares,
and waits,
his hair falling on his shoulders,
his beard spliced with gray
in its redness, dreaming.
His almond eyes green,
hidden, note his past,
until a cuckoo sounds
and the sun breaks
through bluing clouds,
melting the wax of his wings
and awakening him to gold.

"Journey" by Keith Harvey

Journey

Her son chased crows and rats from the dying stalks.
Winter was coming.
Her belly rounded and swelled, heavy with the swan’s
child. She felt its darkness and she feared for its safety.
Crow man lay on his back in buffalo grass and watched
white clouds wither and break. Northern breezes hinted at frost
and he thought of clams buried in the sugary sand of the south.
Raven and wolf-girl waded through the tall grass
calling his name until their shadows surrounded him.
Raven said, “the manatees eat tasty grass in the bayou.”
Crow man smiled his crooked smile. He stood and adjusted the stag
horns he now wore. Dried feathers fell, wilted onto the earth.
He thought of the slow manatees
scouring the floor of the bayous,
saltwater bays, and estuaries.
He picked up his reed bag and checked his possessions:
cuckoo egg, peacock feather, rat’s bones, and dried gourd.
He was ready for his fool’s journey.
He would swim with the manatees,
ride their backs into the surf
and sing their oceanic songs.
He would blow the conch shell
and touch the second door.
With a hoot and howl
he struck out through the buffalo grass
with wolf girl snapping at his heels
and Raven above, shading him from the sun.

The "mandorla" in the poetry of Paul Celan

As I read more and more Paul Celan poetry, I have come to realize that his poetry is meant to be a mandorla, a sacred space of creation. The mandorla symbolizes that dark fecund space between the two doors of existence, where the poet, alchemist, or the shaman can create, conjure and remember the greenness of life. Remember the lines from Epitaph for François that I quoted in an earlier post: Die beiden Türen der Welt/ stehen offen/ the two doors of the world stand open.

As J.E. Cirlot states in A Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1995), “two circles are sometimes used to symbolize the Upper and Lower worlds, that is heaven and earth.” In the poetry of Celan, the two worlds break down between the void or darkness before life and the void or darkness after death. The two circles intersect to form life, where the living remember, observe and create art, which grows the memories of the dead, through the express medium of language. The poet, then, is an alchemical creature, a Hermes, that creates between the two doors. Further, through this creation of man, God becomes whole.

In a poem in Die Niemandsrose, Celan explicitly states his theme. Your/ Being beyond in the night./ With words I fetch you back, there you are,/all is true and a waiting/ for truth. (Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger, Persea Books 2002, p. 139).

"Spiky Palm" and "Illya's Honey/Dallas Poets Community"

I want to thank the editors of Spiky Palm, Carol Cotton and Chuck Wemple, for publishing my poem Seashell in their latest issue and Ann Howells of Illya's Honey/Dallas Poets Community for accepting two poems-Glacier and Sea Wife-for their December issue.

In memory of Cydney W. Adams-"School Days" by Keith Harvey

School Days

A two-wheeled trailer, parked
on a hill in a pasture near Nacogdoches,
casts a silver shadow
toward an anemic creek
with water the color
of a fly’s eye,
as a November sun set.

James, a bottle of Jim Beam
in his hand, said to Cyd
and me, “I love The Dead.
I love it something awful.”
He guzzled the last swallow
of the pint and threw it against a stump.

I opened a Coors that James had driven
to Dallas on a whim to buy and added,
“Me, I like those mystical Germans-
Hesse and Mann, with their long, serpentine
sentences slithering down the page.
Tonio Krüger or old Aschenbach.
That’s for me.”

Cyd, pulling a rotten tooth
from his dwarf sized mouth,
the true poet among us,
sucked on a Camel and said,
“Thomas. That’s the ticket.
The old Dylan.”

James staggered to the trailer,
crawled beneath,
to lie on the earth and sleep.
He wrapped himself in a red blanket
that my Choctaw Granny made me.

“What the hell are you doing?”
Terry asked.
“Resting,” he replied in November
in the piney woods
in 1974 at the end of the war.

Cain and Abel and Corn-Mother

While working on my cycle of poems about Adam and Eve, I returned to Genesis 4:1-8. In thinking about the difference between Cain, the first born, and Abel, the second, it is obvious that the struggle arises between the agriculturist and the shepherd. One sacrifices produce and the other blood. As I was thinking about this difference, it struck me that what is really occurring here is a struggle between an older polytheistic matriarchal society and a newer monotheistic patriarchal one.

Vegetation or agriculture was traditionally controlled by female gods, such as Isis and Demeter, something that would have been abhorrent to the early Hebrews. Consequently, Cain is aligned with the corn-mother or the corn-goddess, while Abel is associated with the very male Hebrew "Lord." The offering of grain and corn is no longer sufficient; instead, the male "Lord" requires blood to be spilt and a life sacrificed.

This interpretation seems plausible when we discover that an ur-text is the Sumerian tale The Wooing of Inanna. This story tells of the ancient conflict between nomadic herders and settled agrarian farmers. Dumuzi, the god of shepherds, and Enkimdu, the god of farmers, compete for Ianna, the chief goddess. Because Dumuzi is brash and aggressive, he wins the favor of Inanna and Enkimdu relents and tells Inanna to marry Dumuzi. Later he wanders away like Cain.

"Corn" by Keith Harvey

Corn

Disguised as a crow, he discovered the cornfield nestled in a valley,
a trough of fertile land stretched between two thighs of hills west
of the red river and south of his first cave, where thousands of crows
circled above green stalks, chiseled into brightness against blue
skies, topped and heavy with maize. Watching the birds
he learned the lesson of the corn and soon he was tearing cobs
from the stalks and eating the white, red, and yellow kernels.
Having eaten his fill he gathered corn in his arms and returned to her;
and, even though it was he that discovered the grain, it was she that saw
its importance and after she had eaten her fill she gathered their possessions
and forced him to move their camp to the hills above the field.
Once there she named it mother because the field nourished them
as she nourished her firstborn from her breasts. She took charge
of the field and told her son that he would be a man of the corn
rather than a febrile crow man like the other, his father.
The son listened carefully and called her corn-mother, confusing the two.

Paul Celan as Shaman

Michael Hamburger in his excellent Poems of Paul Celan, Persea Books, 2002, places two poems side by side, creating, at least for me, the impression that they are to be read together. The two poems are From Darkness to Darkness/ Von Dunkel zu Dunkel and Epitaph for François/Grabschrift für François. The truth of the matter is that Epitaph was written a year before Darkness. Nevertheless they both involve and elicit an understanding of death and its relationship to life and they are both haunting in their simplicity and depth. Ted Hughes believed that the poet was a shaman and that his poetry was ritualistic in nature and had the power to transform the reader. I believe Hughes and I think that the shaman’s power is alive in these two poems. The shaman, like our friend Hermes, is a psychopomp; he leads us to the underworld and then back again. In Darkness, the “I/ich” sees his own darkness in the eye of the other. “Du schlugst die Augen auf-ich seh mein Dunkel leben./ You opened your eyes-I saw my darkness live.” In Epitaph, the dying child opens the two doors of existence-life and death- and the living, the survivor, carries the “green” memory of the dead forward.

"Lone Wolf" by Keith Harvey

Lone Wolf

She knew that I dreamed of wolves and so on a frigid moonless night
she told me the story of a lone wolf, the only wolf left in a western state,
who traveled several hundred miles north to find a mate
and when he arrived at his destination in another country
this lone wolf discovered for the first time that he was an old wolf,
too old to mate with the young females of this pack,
even though he had sniffed her out on a hint of air.
Too exhausted to return to his country, he hung about the pack,
still a lone wolf but close enough to smell her in heat.
After weeks of following the pack and being driven from his kills
by younger wolves he sickened and died in a stand of ash.
As she told me this story I recognized the wolf in her golden eyes
and I smelled her canine breath as she rested her dark head
on my chest. She smiled, baring her teeth, and I knew
that she saw my gray thinning hair
and the scars on my shoulders and legs.
She knew that my time was passing
and that if I didn’t join the pack now,
her faithful gaze would soon fade away
at the sound of the howls of younger wolves
and she would leave me to the cold and snow,
to hunger for her warmth and starve.

Alchemical Transformation in "As You Like It"

From time to time, while writing, an image will emerge that possesses a magical quality. These images spring forth from the unconscious mind and contain archetypal connections that produce a response in the reader that is somehow related to our deeper non-intellectual understanding. Recently, while reading Shakespeare’s As You Like It, I felt that such a mythic image entered quickly, unbidden and unsuspected, to provide the ultimate solution to the comedy. Further, I believe that these images are alchemical symbols acting as short hand exemplars of transformation.

The play tells the story of two noble families. In each family a brother has betrayed and usurped his brother. As a result of the usurpation the “better” brother is forced into the forest. The forest here is the place where confusion is resolved and consequently takes on the characteristic of a psychological temenos, an enclosure that cooks the participants and transforms them.

The main two characters are Rosalind and Orlando. Rosalind is the young daughter of he banished Duke Senior and Orlando is the younger son of Sir Rowland de Boys. Orlando has been usurped by his oldest brother, Oliver, and denied any participation in his legacy. In fact, as the play opens Oliver plots to have his brother killed in a wrestling match.

Although the plot initially seems to be a revenge play, we eventually learn that it is a comedy and that it will end in marriage. In the end four couples marry and a conversion occurs to Oliver. This conversion is a magical event fraught with mythic overtones. However, it occurs offstage and seems tacked on.

Orlando finds his brother lost and asleep in the forest. A snake is about to enter Oliver’s mouth when Orlando comes to his rescue, driving the snake away; however, a female lion waits in the bushes and attacks Orlando, wounding him severely. Here is the magic-the mythic image of the snake and the female lion serve as a conduit to the mythic plane. On one hand we are to read the scene realistically but on the other we understand that the snake and the lion are familiar archetypal images, as well as alchemical symbols, which transform Oliver through their power. Note that the snake was about to enter Oliver’s sleeping mouth. The snake was about to be ingested and thereby assimilated, while the lioness, the darkened female image, was about to consume him. However, his brother saves him and is wounded by the female lion, which results in conversion and order.

Both the snake and the lioness symbolize “Mercurius or the divine mercurial water of transformation, and the prima materia.” Once again our friend Mercurius or Hermes appears to act in his role of transformation. I believe that Shakespeare used the alchemical images as short hand to show that Orlando and Oliver lost in the forest undergo a psychological sea change.

"Opossum" by Keith Harvey

Opossum

Sniffing strawberries,
she trips a sensor
and two halogen beams
bathe her in light,
blinding her.
She tiptoes,
helpless and exposed,
sniffing her way,
across Mexican tile,
searching for an escape
from this unbearable clarity,
this day for night
on a suburban stage.
She smells the strawberries
and lingers in her desire.
She knows the way back:
across the grass,
up the gingko tree,
scratching its tender bark
with her claws,
a run along a gnarled limb,
traversing the fence,
a jump to the live oak,
a descent to the alley,
a sprint to the drainage ditch
that passes beneath the freeway,
and finally an escape into the woods.
However, the smell of the berries
traps her within the light
that reveals her vanity:
her hairless tail,
her blanched fur,
infested with lice,
her sensitive snout,
and her weak, moist eyes.
Like a diver,
she hesitates
before her jump.
But the light hurts,
so she flees
and as she does
the light fades
but she lacks courage
to return.

"Anger" by Keith Harvey

Anger

She finds him in a hollow
talking with a red fox,
their two heads pressed together
in quiet communion.
The sight of him dressed in his feathers,
whispering confidences to the silky fox,
so angers her
that if she were not holding
his newborn son on her hip
she would smash his head
with the first smooth stone
that would fit her hand.
The child, sensing her anger,
fights against her grip
and fills the hollow
with his fledgling cries,
forcing her to shift him
to the other hip
and frightening the fox
who flees
into a copse
of ash.

"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.