“These young people are condemned for using violence. But are we not constantly subjected to violence? Because we are born and bred in a dungeon we no longer even notice that we are stuck in a hell-hole chained hand and foot and with gags in our mouths. What on earth do you mean ‘lawful state of affairs’? A ‘law’ that turns the greast mass of citizens into beast-like slaves in order to satisfy the unnatural requirements of an insignificant and degernate minority? And this law, sustained by brute force through the military and by the mindless cunning of its spices – this law is violence, constantly and brutally perpetuated against justice and common sense, and I shall fight it with word and deed wherever I can.”

Georg Büchner, letter to his family, Strasbourg, 1833.

*

“I see it, I see it and don’t see it, and my stick, it spoke to the stone, and my stick, it’s keeping silent now, and the stone, you say, can speak, and in my eye the veil is hanging, the movable one, the veils are hanging, the movable ones, you lift one and the second’s already hanging there, and the star, oh yes, it’s above the mountains now——, if it wants to go in, it will have to get married and soon not be itself anymore, but half veil and half star, and I know, I know, cousin, I know, I met you, here, and we’ve talked, a lot, and the folds there, you know, for humans they’re not and not for us, who went walking and came on each other, we here under the star, we, the Jews who came here, like Lenz, through the mountains, you Gross and me Klein, you the babbler, and me, the babbler, we with our sticks, we with our names, unspeakable, we with our shadow, our own and alien, you here and I here——”

Paul Celan, “Conversation in the Mountains,” trans. John Felstiner.

*

Some video postcards from Alsace, through Büchner and Celan at Big Other.

*

Thinking of Büchner and Celan. Büchner after The Hessian Messenger, in political exile from Germany. Going to Alsace. Writing Lenz.

The radical left-wing Büchner. The anti-Cartesian Büchner.

I didn’t talk about Büchner’s politics on the Big Other post, and that is an unforgivable withholding.

Büchner and my dream of monstrous vengeful wholeness. John Reddick, “Introduction” to Büchner’s Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings:

“It helps if we recognize what is surely the paradox of paradoxes in Georg Büchner: his disjunctive mode with its relentless insistence on fragments and particles is always the expression of a radiant vision of wholeness… but almost always a wholeness that is poignantly elusive: it was, but is no longer; or will be but isn’t yet; or —— most poignant of all —— it is in the present, but can be possessed only partially or transiently. Büchner is thus forced to be a maker of mosaics.”

*

Lenz, so porous in the Vosges. You go mad because you feel everything all the time. You go mad because you have a skin (pores). You go mad because you know the skin is more hole than flesh. Once you start knowing that, you can’t stop. The immuno-compromised writer. Laid bare to the world. All this to say: I’m sick again. Can’t see out of my own eyes for the swelling and scarring. What am I allergic to today? What bit of world is inflaming me today?

I get drawn into Büchner’s prose rhythm, Celan’s prose rhythm. Which is to say: I start to hyperventilate. Büchner’s comma, Celan’s dash. Stops and starts and starts and starts. Writing to possess me. To take my breath away.

In Strasbourg, I entered the Église Saint-Thomas because I wanted to see the famous tomb. But in the church, for some reason, they were having an exhibit, which was not really an exhibit, because there were no signs or placards to indicate the whats or wherefores of the exhibit.

The exhibit: which was really just a few frames, two glass displays, containing books or pieces of paper, upon which were scrawled lines of poetry. Lines of poetry from Akhmatova or Jabès.

The first line of poetry I saw was from Celan.

Was I followed? Was I called? I was thinking about him before I came to Alsace, when I was still in Germany, pulling my own hair out of my scalp because of a brutally unhappy family: my own but not my own (will never be my own). And here he was. To greet me. In this Protestant church in Strasbourg.

I felt I could recognize the handwriting, which was not Celan’s. The uncanny always being familiar. Instances like that are good for making me stupid again. Stupere. I often need to be a very particular kind of stupid to write. “Amazed.”

Celan, who wrote in the speech accepting the Georg Büchner prize:

“Perhaps——I’m only asking——perhaps poetry, like art, is going with a self-forgotten I toward the uncanny and the strange, and is again——but where? but in what place? but with what? but as what?——setting itself free?

“Then art would be the distance poetry must cover——no less, no more.

“I know, there are other shorter paths. But poetry too hurries ahead of us at times. La poésie, elle aussi, brûle nos étapes.”

*

The distance poetry covers to reach me. I only want the words that are itinerant. Refugees. Migratory words (birds). Angry words (birds). Word that burns every step. Burns every step behind it to survive. I, too.

*

*

Coeur; là aussi fais-toi connaître.

Heart; there too, make yourself known.