Two poems from Paul Celan

  "Untitled"

You lie amid a great listening,
enbushed, enflaked.

Go to the Spree, to the Havel,
go to the meathooks,
the red apple stakes
from Sweden--

Here comes the gift table,
it turns around an Eden--

The man became a sieve, the Frau
had to swim, the sow,
for herself, for no one, for everyone--

The Landwehr Canal won't make a murmur.
Nothing

       stops.

(From the translation by John Felstiner.)

"Death Fugue"


Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning and we drink
and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true

(Excerpt from the translation by Michael Hamburger.)

In memoriam

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/788.html

An aspect of criticism is to coax a series of abstractions from a text that is brave enough to be ambiguous about them. Whether these abstractions help or hinder our understanding of the work depends mostly on the type of the text and its aims. A book that is about 'strife in India and its uncompromising effect on its subjects', for example, may in fact be literal enough that any difficulty in its interpretation can be traced directly to the authorial source; perhaps, we are warranted in feeling, the author does not yet control his themes well enough to enable him to be clearer about his meaning. Another problem with such thematically obvious writing is its tendency to degenerate into little more than a mouthpiece for its author's strident declarations; books like The White Tiger fall into this broad category, where characters are trodden upon in order to voice the apparently more urgent contentions of their creator (that in the case of The White Tiger these contentions are ordinary enough to be meaningless is not itself a valid criticism, because the first responsibility of such 'social-message' novels is to express such ordinary truths forcefully enough that any doubts about their ordinariness disappear. ). Such works are usually immune to criticism precisely because their so-called 'social message' is dire enough and weighty enough to expel any expectations of literariness. Implicit to such an appraisal is the thesis that the author is in a position to 'say something important', a position that we the 'common readers' can never obtain simply by the trivial tautology that we do not currently occupy it. This thesis is not unlike a potential argument for God, not unlike an argument for a preferred frame of reference that supersedes others, and contradicts rather than subverts the classical aims of literature. Novels like TWT and obviously interventional works like The Fountainhead cannot be subjected to any degree of meaningful discussion without first abandoning their 'social messages', and agreeing that such messages cannot be conflated with their thematic content. The question is then whether they are in fact possessed of themes that can be annotated and meaningfully pointed to, and characters that reflect a certain aspect of reality that is tied with these themes.

In fw, waiting. There are the most unique and beautiful buildings here, buildings made entirely of brick of varying shades of redness. One particularly striking example I saw on my way to main street: faded orangish-claret and punctuated with scrapings of a white cement-like essence that imparts a decided character to its facade, like an old man not afraid to conceal the invasions of grey on his scalp. Further down on main street, as if affirming the kind knowing senility of the place, there are roads made wholly of brick. The uniform ruled redness in the distance clarifies itself when approached, defies charges of sameness by presenting its varying contours as evidence of an inner unperceived essence. The cool sunlight meanwhile suggests to the mind an image of black metallic steel chairs, stretched feet, and the promise of some moistening beverage.

Jacob is 24, unmarried, and loves fw. He told me his friends were 'all moving to Austin' and scoffed at the thought. I assured him that if the rest of fw was as featured as downtown, his decision was the wiser one. He explained the bricks by pointing to the wall where a photograph of fw in its early days, a hansom in the foreground and an old man beside it. He said the brick roads were laid to facilitate the horses that trotted to and from the slaughterhouse, so that their hooves would feel more at home on their loving surfaces.

Later: in barnes and nobel. Almost bought three more Henry James novels but had to stop myself: this book buying profligacy has gone far enough already.

(From a journal entry dated Jan 23).

Why not take the plunge?

Just read Coetzee's review of Naipaul's Half A Life (the final essay in Inner Workings, a collection of articles about authors that have influenced Coetzee). What I take away from such articles nowadays varies in fundamental ways from the enthusiastic but finally callow appraisals of style that have marred my thought in the recent past; I have begun to understand, for example, that the primary function of a literary novel lies in the themes that surreptitiously inhabit it: what it is about, what it appears to be about, what it wants to be about. Style on the other hand does not seem a commodious enough vehicle to contain the separations between the social and individual that distinguish art from reality. Structure in a novel, by this token, can be interpreted as a desire to frame the more meaningful aspects of one's reality (a necessary combination of social events and individual thought and expression) while omitting those that do not appear to contain any meaning. Such a structure, far from being (as I previously felt) a vulgar attempt to make the art more 'presentable' to an audience, tokens a perhaps genuine desire to say what is meant. There is nothing inherently social in the desire to impart form to a formless reality; in fact, I feel now that this is more scrupulous an aspiration than a more obviously individual, specious subversion that is a hallmark of the stylistic writer.
(From a journal entry dated January 7.)