La Parole

The night hums with a heat
that embraces southern stars
that glitter above moist haze.
She in a word is a revenant
who escapes her captivity
to whisper primordial verse
softly into my left ear.
Her incantation
returns me to the crossroad,
where the sandal shod
erected a herm.
Soon, the caravans
congregate
and translate
the runes and hieroglyphs
of Babel.

Wille zur Macht

Loosened from Khaos’ grip
by her toothy bite
of the pomegranate’s pulpy skin,
he pondered his singular way
to the Latinate’s southern will.
To align his thoughts,
he danced his myth
in his ebony feathers
and pounded python skin
stretched over hollowed green gourd
until the wintry sun set
in a salted sea
and the leviathan spewed
a multitude of drops,
scattering like stars.

Huis Clos

On a red sand beach,
beastmen purse swollen lips
and blow a mordant moan
against the sweet slash of coral conch.
Bedecked in ebon feathers,
he sits and thinks
of her will
that penetrated
the quotidian membrane
to grasp the ruby fruit.
Her fingers tore them
from Khaos’ grim grasp,
loosing them,
alone and voiceless,
creating from nothingness
something that resembled fabric,
plastic and printed,
pathetic, yet irrefutable,
serviceable, yet infinite.

The Mason

In a single sinister voice
they sent a silent slave
to seek him
in his solitude.

Startled, he surfaced
in their muddled mist.
Confused by their voices,
he followed them
to their throne room.
He wore a cotton singlet
and a black leather apron.
In his bare arms
he carried
a steel square,
a bronze trowel,
and a ball of cotton string.

They cheered his mathematics,
then led him through narrow streets
to a secluded clearing,
where, using a marble slab,
he drew a diagram
on rice papyrus
with a goose quill
and octopus ink.

Finished,
he drove silver stakes
into red clay
with an iron hammer.

He stretched string
stuttering a sibilant sound.

They heard a command
for water, manure, clay and straw.
They set the slaves to stamping;
they fired ceramic kilns,
while he dreamed
the dimensions
of the dome.

"Cave Gossip" accepted by Permafrost

I wish to thank Brian Keenan and the other editors at Permafrost, the University of Alaska's literary magazine, for accepting "Cave Gossip" for a May/June publication. "Cave Gossip" is one of the longer poems in Petroglyphs.

Yet Another from Khaos' Magic

Fauna

Her bright brogue
warned me
to stay
upon the clay.
But wolfbane,
yellow green,
lured me
off the way.
I wandered
until snow fell
in frail flakes
and frigid ferns
snapped.
Time blanketed
sleeping bears.

One more from Khaos' Magic

Busker

He sings
the cosmic egg
on the tube’s platform;
his lyre case open
on greasy cement.

He composes lyrics
about fourfold
worlds, while others
drop crumpled bills
upon green felt.

His vision becomes words;
his words become worlds.
They ebb and flow
between the void
and Thoth’s light.

Zipporah shucks clams
with her flint knife.
Her son’s blood
mediates chaos
and appeases the groom.

Another from Khaos' Magic

The Staff’s Snake

With a single sinister stroke
his staff’s snake staggers
law’s stern progress.
Its blunt blow
breaks a clay pot
thrown by red hands
bronze-aged by an orange sun.
He stammers a sibilant message:
Khaos’ flood drowns
Babel’s language.
He awaits the primordial word
to slip past paralyzed lips.

Two from Khaos' Magic

Zipporah’s Flint

She murmurs:
magic managed
demands blood.
She scrapes
her son’s skin
away with a flint
and wipes blood
on her husband’s feet,
loosing Khaos
from the desert
and paying passage
to Pharoah’s plague.



Impedimenta

He slowly speaks,
meaning he hesitates
between thought and word.
He stutters
and stammers
like the Púca.
Yet, even with this malady,
he transforms stored visions
through mediation
of his brother’s tongue
into a magic rod.

Lichtung

When he arrived
from the desert,
his feet
covered in blood,
slow of speech
and tongue,
he met his elder,
his brother,
the shining light,
the mediator,
the messenger,
equal to Thoth,
in language
and argument,
who agreed,
in a clearing,
to speak,
and translate
his words
into magic.

Aaron's Sorcery

to Michael Moorcock

Reading primordial words,
red runes carved
and stained
on polished burl,
he shifts his shepherd’s staff
into his sinister hand.

He casts it onto ferrous rock,
where it slithers into silver shade,
seeking its chaotic source,
stunned into being
by a steady whisper.

"Filet" from Petroglyphs

He slaps the silver trout
flat upon the Times,
wetting the newsprint
and blackening it
like a Cajun chef.
He filets
it stealthily
with sharpened steel,
dividing the shimmering scales
and extracting wizened bones.
He sets it
aside salty flesh,
a skinny doppelganger
to fertilize the roses.

Michael Moorcock-Literary Addiction

I have a new obsession and I am adding it to my list of subjects that make manifest an insatiable desire to know everything there is to know about Paul Celan, Ted Hughes, Carl Jung, Rollo May, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Hermann Hesse, Jean Paul Sartre, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Mann, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, the surrealists, Max Beckmann, German and French history, and epic fantasy.

This new obsession possesses an odd name-Michael Moorcock-and supposedly lives near me in Texas. He is a Brit, living in Bastrop, but I don’t believe it. Oh, I believe that-maybe in an alternate universe-this Brit lives in Texas, but not really.

How did this obsession begin? How did this obsession creep up on me and why haven’t I discovered this guy before this late date? I mean he is my kind of guy. He likes to read the classics. He loves comics, Edgar Rice Burroughs, science fiction, games, and epic fantasy. He mentions Nabokov, a previous obsession, and he seems to know a lot about history, especially European history. He began publishing in the sixties-the period when I would read one or two science fiction novels a day-so how did his work escape my attention? I can’t figure it out. Maybe it is because his novels have a dream-like quality to them, which would have turned me off in the sixties, when I loved the science fiction of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. As I read him now, I am reminded of Céline and William S. Burroughs, writers which I didn’t initially appreciate.

Nevertheless, I now know who he is. I backed into him, through a writer, who I now know borrowed heavily from him-David Gemmell. But I didn’t read him until I saw a blurb on his Pyat series, a blurb that intrigued me because the plot of the novel seemed similar to what I was trying to do in my unpublished novel-The Blond Beast. So I picked up a copy of the first novel in his Pyat series-Babylon Endures-in one of those marvelous British paperbacks and devoured it in one or two sittings. It is a picaresque tale of a self-hating Jew (maybe), living in Russia in the early Twentieth Century, trying to survive the Russian Revolution. As an aside, I read Martin Amis' Koba the Dread the same week and these two books made wonderful companions.

I am now a full-blown Moorcock addict, as hooked on his literary drug, as Elric or Pyat are addicted to their drugs of choice.

Now here is where it gets good. There is an added bonus. Many of his books are out of print and impossible to find. I am an inveterate book collector. I am never happier than when I am tracking a book by its dusty scent. So what do I have? I have a great writer, whose books have disappeared. So let the search begin; and the reading; and the writing.

I intend posting several short essays on Moorcock as I track his books and devour them like some slime monster in the wicked passages of an ancient city of the multiverse.

Two More from Petroglyphs

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.



Awakening

His black crow feathers
ignite into red flames,
melting golden bees’ wax
between the pinions.
He falls to his center,
drawn downward by word’s gravity,
until he lies like a silver stone
unconcealed in the clearing.

Two from Petroglyphs by Keith Harvey

Fishing

Cast upon impulse
a hand-made nymph
teases silver trout.
They pierce shadow green waters,
projecting their javelin selves
toward a breathless line.


Smoothest Stone

A line without end is breathless
Euclid


The smoothest stone weighs
heavy in the bed of a trout’s stream.
Silver scales shimmer
sanded by breathless time,
a spear’s head thrust into being,
resting on our meridian,
defining our shadows
against the word’s gravity.

Thoughts on Primordial Words, while reading Celan

Jung talks about images arising from the unconscious mind and often quotes a phrase that he inscribed on the lintel of the door to his Küsnacht hideaway-vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit (called or not called the gods will be there). These images, arriving unbidden, are sometimes archetypal, filled with emotion and weight, or primordial, fresh and newly born. Silence, meditation, or dreams open up a space for primordial or archetypal language to emerge, just as images and symbols arise from the unconscious. If we can capture these images in their freshness, newly arisen from the unconscious, and use them in poetry, then these images, now words, feel numinous within the poems' landscape. Primordial language, then, is felt, heard, and seen. It is emotive in quality, with weight as its predominant characteristic. Primordial language is like a stone emerging from thick green loam of an ancient pagan land, a stone among the scree of the Wortlandschaft (Celan). Jung employs a similar geographic metaphor to describe the unconscious. Robert Brockway in his biography Young Carl Jung, Continuum International Publishing Group (September 1997), wrote that "the prime source of Jung's concept of the collective unconscious was probably his idea of the geology of the human personality or Bodenbeschafftenheit." Each new word that springs up into consciousness resonates with feeling, which is felt through desire, desire for the sacred, the numinous, and the primordial. These primordial words are, in effect, incarnations of the spirit that are ultimately made flesh, arriving on pigeon feet (Heidegger and Celan), from the unknown, moving toward the known, and then settling into everydayness before disappearing in plain sight, like a stone beneath our feet. Once they disappear, we miss them and feel extreme Sehnsucht.

Der Riss, Etching, Geographical Upheaval in Celan

As we proceed with our analysis of the second poem of Atemwende, Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt am Main 1967), I believe it is important to focus on two concepts-the physical process of etching and Heidegger’s use of the German word, der Riss, which refers us back to our discussion of Pyramus and Thisbe and propels us forward into Heidegger’s concept of art, a concept that Celan engaged, studied, incorporated, and debated for over ten years. Further, held within the word-der Riss-is a semantic connection to the concepts of divide, tear, and furrow, which rhetorically connects the second poem in the collection to the third and associates a tear, a furrow (die Rille) or a rift with the actual process of etching through a figurative comparing of the rift in the seam of Brotland that forms the Lebensberg with the physical processes of the art. According to the catalogue of the National Gallery of art -Etching is an intaglio technique whereby marks are bitten into the metal plate by chemical action. The plate is coated with a ground (either hard or softground) impervious to acid through which the artist draws to expose the metal. The plate is then immersed in an acid bath until the open lines of areas are sufficiently bitten. Finally, the ground is removed and the plate inked and printed. Etching is commonly used in combination with drypoint, aquatint, and other intaglio processes. The language employed in this definition seems to connect metaphorically with seismic activities that cause mountains to spring from the earth and locate some of the imagery in the world/earth dichotomy. Further, the divide between the mountain and the land creates both a physical barrier (geographical) and a figurative (concealed/unconcealed) barrier between the “ich” and the “du” that is ultimately juxtaposed metaphorically between the states of sleep and waking.

Synecdoche, Abtasten, Paradox in Paul Celan

The second poem of Paul Celan’s collection, Atemwende, Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt am Main 1967), begins with a paradox and a nod at the etchings that his wife includes in the work. The first line -Von geträumtem geätzt (from the undreamed etched)- presents the first problem of the poem. We go on to read that the undreamed etches out the Lebensberg from Brotland. The image of a Brotland/breadland refers back somewhat obliquely to the Maulbeerbaum of the previous poem, especially when we remember that the mulberry belongs to the same family as breadfruit. So from this image of bread and food, we are also reminded of paper and the poet, which makes sense in light of the fact that the first line also transports us to the realm of fairytales. The first paradox lies in the fact that fairy tales are the product of dreams; however, it is the undreamed images that etch Brotland and create the Lebensberg. Undreamed images must be experienced images, images experienced while awake. However, the “ich” of the poem is asleep and he is attempting to awaken himself.

Before we continue, I think it is important to make some associations and to identify certain allusions, which I will not fully explore in this post. Brotland seems to indicate a physicality, an image that relates to the body-either as a living entity or a corpse. Celan was a great student of both the Jewish Bible as well as the Christian and I believe that Brotland refers to the sacrament of the body and the use of unleavened bread as a substitute for the body-not of Christ’s body here but of the bodies of those who died in the Holocaust. Further, I believe that Lebensberg is both an allusion to Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg and a reference to Heidegger’s Lebensphilosophie. Finally, Brotland is the land of the dead, where the dead wander sleeplessly and un-dreaming. Ironically, the Lebensberg emerges from the land of the dead, a land from which the "ich” struggles to awaken.

The first line then seems to signal the struggle of the dead to reawaken and, in effect, be resurrected to life; however, this transformation must be “sussed out.” This symbolic reading must be refined because it is not the dead that arises but the poet. It is the poet who must probe with his fingers to awaken toward the “du.” Consequently, in further investigations, we must focus on the poet and his “sussing out” the darkness of Brotland and the caverns of the Lebensberg. To do this involves an investigation of the methodology of un-concealing the concealed, which involves ultimately transformation or rebirth. This process is contained in Celan’s use of the verb abtasten, which means to feel, to scan, or to suss out. It has a further meaning, which might be used effectively here, and that is "to palpate." To palpate the body fits our view that Brotland is the body or corpse, where body acts as a synecdoche for a people.

Synesthesia, Snow, and Sussing Out in Celan

In the second poem of Paul Celan’s collection, entitled Atemwende, Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt am Main 1967), he creates an image that relies on the use of the scientific concept of synesthesia in a surrealist image of eyes on the fingertips of the “ich.” He writes Aug an jedem der Finger,/ abtaste nach/einer Stelle (eye on each finger,/ feeling for a place). Through the probing finger the “I” seeks to awaken toward the “you.” Once again we have the poem’s protagonist seeking illumination and union with the other. This time the search is conducted through touch, which will awaken the “I” to the light cast by die helle/ Hungerkerze im Mund (the bright hunger candle in the mouth). Through touch, sight is possible through the light cast by the hunger candle. Implicit in the poem is imagery connected to “mining,” darkness, sight/blindness, food, baking, feeding, silence and creation through reduction, as presented by the use of the word “etching.”

In a previous blog I pointed out that I considered the collection as a unified whole. If my theory is correct, there should be some rhetorical unification to the first poem “Du Darfst,” which I discussed in length in a previous blog, with the meaning of the second poem “Von Ungetraumtem."

Over the past few weeks I have been contemplating the use of the word “snow” in the first poem and I believe that “snow” conveys “silence.” The “ich” says du darfst mich getrost/mit Schnee bewirten. Over the Christmas holidays I was in northern New Mexico, where I was caught in a blizzard, and trapped in a hotel for three days. On a Thursday night, it began to snow big fat wet flakes. At first it was fun walking through the plaza; however, the snow fell at the rate of one inch per hour and soon everything was covered in a thick white blanket. Eventually, all movement stopped and people disappeared from the streets. The starkest result of this freak storm was silence. I thought of Celan’s poem and I wondered if the snow in the first poem silenced the poet, who in the summer had walked with the mulberry tree. Later, I discovered another poem, entitled “Mit Wechselndem Schüssel.” In this poem Celan talks of a house, where the snow of what’s silenced is driven.

Let’s assume for a moment that the poet has been silenced in the first poem; however, in the second poem he awakens and seeks the “you.” Or on a grander scale, let’s assume that a German poet, through the Nazi period, has had his mother tongue defiled and desecrated, and now is trying to probe his way to a new language. The process is tedious and difficult, like being lost in a mountain, in a tunnel with no light, where he must feel his way with his fingers.

In the next blog, I will continue with a discussion of this poem and focus on the verb “abtasten.”

Pyramus, Thisbe, and Paul Celan

One of the first poems of Paul Celan's that I translated was Wir Lagen, a short poem found in the collection entitled Lichtzwang, Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt am Main, 1970). It is this poem that provides the title to the collection and which, I believe, evokes one of Celan's primary themes-the inability to connect with the other in the face of extreme longing. The other in these poems is unidentified and usually simply appears as "Du." However, the other could be a lover, the mother, God, the Self (in Jungian terms), or Being (in Heideggerian terminology). It is not really important who the "Du" is; instead, the emotions that weld up within the poems, arising from desire, loss, sehnsucht, or mystical yearning, illustrate an almost transcendental need to connect. Similarities in theme exist in the poetry of Rumi and, perhaps more importantly and precisely, to The Song of Solomon.

The following is my translation of Wir Lagen:

We lay
already deep in the shrubs, when you
finally crawled along
but we could not
darken over to you:
it ruled
Lightconstraint.

In Celan, some barrier always exists that frustrates the "ich's" seeking for and uniting with the "Du." In this regard, I believe that the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe provides an important metaphor or trope for Celan and I further believe that he alludes to the myth in the poem, Du Darfst, the first poem in the collection, entitled Atemwende, SuhrkampVerlag (Frankfurt am Main 1967), in order to prepare the reader for an employment of one of his major themes.

The myth of Pyramus and Thisbe emphasizes desire, the frustration of desire, confusion, misunderstanding, loyalty, and the proximate relatedness of thanatos with eros. These themes are established quickly as illustrated by the following quotation from Thomas Bullfinch:

Pyramus was the handsomest youth, and Thisbe the fairest maiden, in all Babylonia, where Semiramis reigned. Their parents occupied adjoining houses; and neighbourhood brought the young people together, and acquaintance ripened into love. They would gladly have married, but their parents forbade. One thing, however, they could not forbid- that love should glow with equal ardour in the bosoms of both. They conversed by signs and glances, and the fire burned more intensely for being covered up.

In the wall that parted the two houses there was a crack, caused by some fault in the structure. No one had remarked it before, but the lovers discovered it. What will not love discover! It afforded a passage to the voice; and tender messages used to pass backward and forward through the gap. As they stood, Pyramus on this side, Thisbe on that, their breaths would mingle. "Cruel wall," they said, "Why do you keep two lovers apart? But we will not be ungrateful. We owe you, we confess, the privilege of transmitting loving words to willing, ears." Such words they uttered on different sides of the wall; and when night came and they must say farewell, they pressed their lips upon the wall, she on her side, he on his, as they could come no nearer.

As we progress in our discussion of Celan's poetry, we should remember the wall separating the lovers and the crack in that wall that provides the means of communication, imperfect though it might be.