The Meridian
A few weeks ago in the newsletter, I wrote about Aaron Zeitlin’s kabbalistic poetic manifesto, “The Cult of Nothing and Art as It Must Be.” Recently I have been reading a great deal of letters and poems by Paul Celan, another Jewish author who is broadly categorized as a “Holocaust writer.” Like Zeitlin, Celan was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. Unlike Zeitlin, Celan wrote in German, which was the language of his upbringing, and was customary for the Jews of Czernowitz (nowadays Chernivtsi, in modern-day Ukraine) during his time. The choice to write in the language of his oppressors is an interesting one which many people have commented on. The choice that Zeitlin made, to write in Yiddish rather than Hebrew or a “goyishe” European language, is equally profound.
Celan’s 1960 acceptance speech for the Georg Büchner prize, “the Meridian,” is something like a manifesto and is in dialogue with Zeitlin’s text in several ways–although, as far as I know, the two authors had no contact with one another. “The Meridian” also refers to the impossibility of clarity and to the dialogue that takes place between a text and its reader. His iconic first sentence states that “art, you will remember, has the qualities of the marionette and the iambic pentameter.” This opening immediately demonstrates affinity with Zeitlin, because the puppet is nothing if not a concealment and a disguise—the puppet is like the mask Zeitlin talked about, which misrepresents both the puppeteer and the fictional character the puppet signifies. Like Zeitlin, Celan critiques literary influencers who think poetry should always be clear, and like Zeitlin, he argues against this by pointing out that obscurity inheres to language, if not to all experience:
“Ladies and gentlemen, nowadays it is fashionable to reproach literature with its ‘‘obscurity.’’ Permit me now, abruptly—but hasn’t something suddenly appeared on the horizon? [...] That is, I believe, if not the inherent obscurity of poetry, the obscurity attributed to it for the sake of an encounter— from a great distance or sense of strangeness possibly of its own making.”
The juxtaposition between “the inherent obscurity of poetry” and “the obscurity attributed to it for the sake of an encounter” actually says more about experience, and about the “encounter,” than it is really a statement about poetry. In order to have an encounter, Celan writes, there must be a strangeness, an obscurity, a distance. The poem is unique because it facilitates this encounter conscientiously, inviting and manifesting the distance or strangeness that enables the encounter to happen. For one to experience something, or to encounter it, one must already be different from it: the poem puts this distance in place by making itself obscure, by making the reader aware of the obscurity that was present even before the poem made it visible.
Celan speaks extensively about an Other, which he does not explicitly relate to the “you,” the imagined other party in a dialogue, which is present in so many of his poems. Rather than understanding this Other or this “you” in terms of its proximity to the poem and its writer, Celan uses the concept to demonstrate the “strange”-ness, the inherent distance and unfamiliarity between the poem and that which it describes.
“I think it has always belonged to the expectations of the poem, in precisely this manner, to speak in the cause of the strange–no, I can no longer use this word–in precisely the manner to speak in the cause of an Other–who knows, perhaps in the cause of a wholly Other.” (Celan’s emphasis)
The meaning of the meridian itself is revealed at the speech’s end, as a proxy to poetry or language, the connection or the path forged between oneself and one’s origin, the impossible and uncognizable distance between two things that are strange to one another:
“I am also seeking the place of my own origin, since I have once again arrived at my point of departure. I am seeking all of that on the map with a finger which is uncertain, because it is restless—on a child’s map, as I readily confess. None of these places is to be found, they do not exist, but I know where they would have to exist—above all at the present time—and . . . I find something! [...]
“I find something which binds and which, like the poem, leads to an encounter.
“I find something, like language, abstract, yet earthly, terrestrial, something circular, which traverses both poles and returns to itself [...] I find… a meridian.”
Celan here takes his commentary beyond the realm of poetics and transforms his speech into a philosophy of language. Language, like the poem, facilitates a connection among things precisely by illuminating the distance between them; language does the impossible, it finds what does not exist and binds the incommensurable. It facilitates an encounter by illustrating the impossibility of the encounter.
Both Zeitlin and Celan, in their respective manifestos, privilege art and poetics as a site for the conscious enactment of this alienation from reality. Both authors describe the obscurity of their artwork as an asset, not a fault, insofar as it enables the artwork to enact the strangeness that is at the core of all perception.
