[For the next three weeks I’m going to be extraordinarily busy raking leaves and cleaning gutters (as well as a few other things) and will be left with almost no time to read blogs or work on my own. So I’m ducking out until the second week in November. I continue to thank everyone for any ongoing interest and for sharing your efforts.]

IN THE AIR your root stays on, there
in the air.
Where earthliness clusters, earthy,
Breath-and-Clay.

Looming
up there, the banned, the
burned: a Pomeranian, at home
in the Maybeetle song that stayed motherly, summerly, bright-
blooded on the edge
of all cragged
cold winterhard
syllables.

With him
the meridians wander:
sucked
up by his
sun-steered pain, which bonds these lands after
the noonday speech of a
loving
distance. Every-
where is Here and Today, is a radiance
made of despairs, that
those who've been sundered step into with their
blinded mouths:

a kiss, at night,
brands the sense of a language they waken to, they--:

gone home again to
uncanny anathema
that gathers the dispersed, those
led through the stary-desert soul, the
tentmakers up there in the zone
of their gazings and ships,
the tiny sheaves of hope
with a rush of archangels'wings, of destiny,
the brothers, the sisters, those
found too light, too heavy,
too light on
cosmic scales in their blood-
defiling
fruitful womb, the lifelong aliens
spermatically crowned with stars, heavily
camped in the shoals, the bodies
embanked in swollen heaps, --the

ford-beings, whom
the clubfoot of the gods
comes stumbling over-- by
whose
star time too late?

--Paul Celan, (1963)

What happened? The stone stepped from the mountain.
Who awakened? You and I.
Language, language. Fellow-star. Earth-cousin.
Poorer. Open. Homeland-like.

Where it went? Towards not expiring.
Went with the stone, and with the two of us.
Heart and heart. Weighed and found sinking.
Growing more heavy. Taking on lightness.

--Paul Celan

.....Certainly the poem, the poem today shows-- and this I think has only indirectly to do with not-to-be-underestimated difficulties of word choice, with the sharper fall of syntax or heightened sense of ellipsis-- the poem unmistakably shows a strong bent toward falling silent.
.....It holds on-- after so many extreme formulations, allow me this one too-- the poem holds on at the edge of itself; so as to exist, it ceaselessly calls and hauls itself from its Now-no-more back into its Ever-yet.

.....But this Ever-yet could be only an act of speaking. Not simply language and probably not just verbal 'correspondence' either.
.....But actualized language, set free under the sign of a radical individuation, which at the same time stays mindful of the limits drawn by language, the possibilities opened by language.
.....This Ever-yet of poems can only be found in a poem by someone who does not forget that he speaks from the angle of inclination of his very being, his creatureliness.
.....Then a poem would be-- even more clearly than before-- the language-become-form of a single person and, following its inmost nature, presentness and presence.

--Paul Celan

Posting on a major literary figurehead is always a daunting task, but even more so if the writer addresses a catastrophic period in history. So this is what was placed upon me when thinking about what I wanted to pass along about Paul Celan. Born into a Jewish family in Eastern Europe, Celan bore witness to the atrocities of World War II while in his younger 20's, the most cataclysmic being the deportation and eventual killing of his parents. After the war, Celan continued to write in his native German tongue but eventually resided as an exile in Paris, where he continued to live until his suicide by drowning in April of 1970.

During and immediately following World War II, Celan’s poetry ended up containing some of literature strongest verse capable of properly reflecting the war and the Holocaust. To such an extent, I defer posting further and simply advise that the poetry needs to be read if there’s a continuing interest. However, Celan’s later poetry I feel comfortable posting about as there occurred changes with both style and content. And this would relate to what Celan held onto most in order to confront the horrors he witnessed during the war:

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for that was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.”

I’d say that what Celan is referring to there is perseverance. The life instinct itself channeled through language. But Celan’s poetry did not become clearer and more focused after the war, but towards the opposite– increasingly abstract. But there was a minimalist approach as well, which signifies a striving towards an attempt for clarity amidst its owns ‘lack of answers’ and ‘terrifying silence’. Even if Celan could not believe in the world around him, he could continue to believe in the importance of language. Because of this, Celan felt a need to transform the German language either into something new entirely, or to recapture Germany’s incredible lyrical tradition. Probably both as Celan’s primary goal was to defy the ways in which Germany had used language during his lifetime.

There are movements in contemporary poetry which focus the lingual techniques used by social systems. I had thought of these schools as interesting, but not anything I would want to spend much time on. However, after reading and thinking about Celan, I can see the importance in always analyzing (and criticizing if need be) how language is used. As Celan realized, language is directly tied to our basic will for life. Taken to the next step, language reflects and shapes how we live. The most obvious example would be how politicians and religious leader’s speak, but the implications could extend whenever a word is spoken, heard or written. What we say and how we say it always matters.

Now I have something to say about these things. I don't know if it's similar to this, or if its dissimilar. But similar and dissimaler are quite similar in the end, so it can't be much different from that. But be that as it may, let me try to say it:

Being a beginning. Being not yet beginning to be a beginning. Being not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. Being being. Being nonbeing. Being not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Being not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Then suddenly, being nonbeing. And when it comes to being nonbeing, I don't know yet what's being and what's nonbeing.

There now: I've spoken. But I still don't know whether it was being spoken or nonbeing spoken.

--Chuang Tzu (trans. by David Hinton)

From Bill Laswell's project, Tabla Beat Science.

Amygdala.

'What does it mean?'

'Nothing. It's a location. It's the dark aspect of the brain.'

'I don't--'

'A place to house fearful memories.'

'Just fear?'

'We're not too certain of that. Anger too, we think, but it specializes in fear. It is pure emotion. We can't clarify it further.'

'Why not?'

'Well-- is it an inherited thing? Are we speaking of ancestral fear? Fears from childhood? Fear of what might happen in old age? Or fear if we commit a crime? It could just be projecting fantasies of fear in the body.'

'As in dreams.'

'As in dreams... though sometimes dreams are not the result of fantasy but old habits we don't know we have.'

'So it's something created and made by us, by our own histories, is that right? A knot in this person is different from a knot in another, even if they are from the same family. Because we each have a different past.'

'I don't think we know yet...'

'It sounds Sri Lankan, the name.'

'Well, check its derivation. It doesn't sound scientific.'

'No. Some bad god.'

--from Anil's Ghost; Michael Ondaatje

From wikipedia: Buduruwagala is an ancient buddhist temple in Sri Lanka. The complex consists of seven statues and belongs to the Mahayana school of thought. The statues date back to 10 century AD. The gigantic Buddha statue still bears traces of its original stuccoed robe and a long streak of orange suggests it was once brightly painted. The central of the three figures to the Buddha's right is thought to be the Buddhist mythological figure-the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. To the left of this white painted figure is a female figure in the thrice-bent posture, which is thought to be his consort-Tara.

An April, 2000 Salon review of Anil's Ghost addresses the morally demanding task Ondaatje had with writing in his usual poetic mode while also finding a way to responsibly address the atrocities of Sri Lanka's civil war:

Ondaatje has set himself a daunting problem: to write a narrative about a matter of extreme moral gravity, keep it as clean and unsentimental and straightforward as the subject requires and also make it a poem, get it off the ground. He doesn't always succeed, but when he does, the liftoff is almost palpable. The mystique of archaeology, that lifelong love affair with the past, is beautifully and enigmatically brought to life. His description of the painting of the Buddha's eyes -- which he symbolically equates with the redemptive act of writing, along with the disciplines of both forensics and archaeology -- is a tour de force.

And it does work, very well. Cultural artifacts are the historial records for mankind's past as well as signposts for the future. They are of human behavior but at the same time, outside as well. They are both immediate and distant. And these are the same qualities an author needs to balance in a narrative text in order to adequately write about horrific historical events, in order to keep it from being over factual (cold and lifeless) or heavyhanded (sentimental).

If you have never read a Michael Ondaatje book, be sure to add one to your ‘to be read’ pile. He is simply amazing at so many levels. The amount of depth he brings into a narrative written largely in a simplistic but poetic mode is marvelous. Rather than formal chapters, Ondaatje instead relies on brief sections that can be anywhere from two paragraphs to a page or two, and each of those sections often reads like an individual poem. The language is so focused and condensed, a reader naturally picks up on all the suggested implications to extend beyond the immediacy of the text. I enjoy Ondaatje’s writing style so much, I sort of which every work of contemporary fiction was written in this style!

For Anil’s Ghost, a native of Sri Lanka returns home after a fifteen year absence and does so in her capacity as a forensic anthropologist in order to investigate possible human rights violations connected to the country’s civil war in the 80's and 90's. However, rather than focusing upon historical specifics for the war, Ondaatje interweaves the personal lives of his characters as well as the ancient cultural artifacts of Sri Lanka. Cave paintings, statues of Buddhas and abandoned monasteries exist side by side with mass grave sites, exhumed skeletons and dangerous political intrigue. Both then analyzed by characters who are simultaneously working through the usual personal traumas of love and family.

Anil’s Ghost is an excellent example of writing that is simultaneously intimate and universal. Always Ondaatje is providing the necessary details to fully grasp the lives of his characters, the history behind Sri Lanka and the massive difficulties that arose during the civil war. But, the method of writing used to incorporate the details is such that it could be applicable to another time, culture and cast of characters. Meaning, humans will always be imbedded into cultural history and subjected to the conflicts of their time. And they will also always be going through their own life challenges while in the midst of these contexts. Obviously, a civil war is an extreme that is ripe for literary drama, but the equation for his narrative is applicable to anyone anywhere. Read the book not to just understand Anil and Sri Lanka’s violent past, but to better understand yourself and the violence, or possibility of violence, in your present.

Quietness
--Rumi

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

The final ten minutes for the film, Koyaanisqatsi.