words. I told the truth, but I told it slant.
In class people wonder why I blush so often. You can’t see your own face, so I don’t know I am blushing. But looking in the faces of others who are looking at your face, though it sounds like a riddle, is to get the smallest glimpse of yourself, even if the realization is no more than I exist, a fact we never speak of, it is so common and holy, and then the blush deepens by burning brighter, shame at my own nakedness, even in class, when I’m wearing all my clothes. Just like in those dreams we all have of going to school or coming into work and realizing you’ve forgotten to dress. The euphemism is “that you look nice today,” but what is silent in the words is I see you’re naked, too.
It’s hard to know when the rites are sacred, or when daily habit is just routine. Making the children’s lunches. Getting them to school. Feeding them at night. Doing the dishes. Readying both girls for bed. Reading them stories. Turning out the lights. Singing to Iris in the dark, the dark of which she is very afraid, while Hana in her room listens to music in her headphones no one else can hear. I might describe it all this way: “It’s tiring; but it’s nice.” By which I might mean: “My soul is dead; this is the sacred work.”
Now I’ve learned that euphemism isn’t cowardice, but a kind of virtue. It is speaking so as to keep silence, lest a word that is unlucky enter into the sacred blank light of day or page and defile it. Maybe this is why so many people make clichés into mantras. But I have no mantra. I just say a lot of words to many different people, and I fill pages with lines and sentences. I don’t know why it is I do these things: talk so much, write so much. Maybe there’s no other way.
Jacques Derrida, writing about Paul Celan, defines the shibboleth:
The Ephraimites had been defeated by the army of Jephthah; in order to keep their soldiers from escaping across the river (shibboleth also means ‘river,’ of course, but that is not necessarily the reason it was chosen), each person was required to say shibboleth. Now the Ephraimites were known for their inability to pronounce correctly the shi of shibboleth, which became for them, in consequence, an unpronounceable name. They said sibboleth, and, at the invisible border between shi and si, betrayed themselves to the sentinel at the risk of their life. They betrayed their difference by showing themselves indifferent to the diacritical difference between shi and si; they marked themselves with their inability to re-mark a mark thus coded.
I’ve seen the shame, and felt it myself, when in a class a student reading aloud comes to a word she doesn’t know how to pronounce, pauses and waits for someone to rescue her, and, hearing no help, stumbles through the syllables, knowing it’s wrong just as we know it’s wrong, assumes she has been excluded from the knowledge she’s there to learn, but no one helps because no one else knows how to pronounce the word either, including me, and each one of us is excluded, too.
Teaching Celan’s poems, while in springtime it snows. His mother shot to death in a forced march in the snow. We speak of I and You. Of God and I and You. Of a God that sings but does not sing of I and You. O one O none O no one O you. That God. We spend our hour on one poem:
With the voice of the fieldmouse
you squeak up to me,
a sharp
clip,
you bite your way through my shirt to the skin,
a cloth,
you slide across my mouth
midway through the words
I address to you, shadow,
to give you weight.
Whose voice speaks. One that does not say I.
Whose voice is your voice. Is it the fieldmouse’s squeak, the bite of the tooth, the cloth across the mouth. You is also no voice at all. When on the street I hear someone say, “You,” I turn around with my whole face open and look at them; and when I say, “You,” to another, she does the same. Emmanuel Levinas says that is the command of the other we hear in our voice when we say, “You.” Her face turns toward us and says in our own words, “Thou shalt not kill.”
Such is the “nudity of he who borrows all.” This is the way I’m nude; it’s the way you’re nude, too. All of language floats above us—so I think of it—some cloud in which the letters combine and recombine, eternal and impossible, the alphabet speaking itself forward and backward at the same time, and from this cloud we pull a word, a line, a sentence or two. Writing volumes diminishes it none. It does not cease; it does not decrease. From it we say all in our lives we do say. At the grocery store, at home, to those we love the most, in those unlit chambers made only of ourselves, we clothe our thoughts in what we do not own.
Celan in his nakedness on the page. To feel with him his shame so we can feel our own.
Celan translates from Samuel Beckett: “And yet I am afraid, afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge, yet again. . . . If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing? Then I might escape being gnawed to death.”
In the poem we do not know what the fieldmouse’s squeak means. Is it greeting, or warning? Happiness, or fear? Does it bite to wake up the man speaking, or does it bite to escape him, or to hurt him, or to gnaw him to death?
I don’t know.
Celan describes a poem as an encounter, as a handshake. The poem is a thing between You and I. It builds, line by line, a ground across which You and I can meet, can see one another, can be in the moral bind of the gaze.
An elegy is a poem to a You gone missing. When the poem sings, You appears.
But what if there were a world in which, on a forced march, a guard calls out not a name, but yells out only “You,” and a young man, a prisoner, steps out from the line in which he trudges forward through the cold forward, and, realizing he wasn’t the one being spoken to, blushes as if embarrassed at his mistake, and then the guard shoots him. What if there were a world in which children were packed into train cars and shipped to camps, and those that were too young to know their names had them written on scraps of cardboard hung on strings around their necks, but with no food, no water, and the train ride so long, the children ate their names for they had no other food, and when they arrive, no one knows what to call them, those children called only “You.” But what if there were a world in which a crippled boy in a camp speaks over and over a variant of one word but no one knows what that word means, and he limps from person to person saying mass-klo or matisklo, and others in the camp think it is the child’s name, and some think it means “bread,” or “meat,” but no one knows with any certainty this one word the boy speaks, his only word, and now nothing of him remains, because in the camp he died. What if there were a world in which that word remains speaking forever in the air. What if there were a world . . . O one, O none, O no one, O you . . . in which that word were the only word of witness.
Celan writes, “You of the same mind, moor-wandering near one.” To be near and far at once. Same and wholly other. To invoke the You you must also avoid, this You so deep inside you it wanders far away on the moors.
A shadow or a shade is the ancient way of considering the person in the afterlife, you still yourself, but without substance, though in another way your nature stays complete. Your character that built a life remains without a life around it. If it were not so, the poet’s
