Greek the verb λαμβάνω means “to grasp, take, receive; to seize with the senses; to understand. The compound form ὑπολαμβάνω means “to pull up so as to see,” “to grasp and pull up” as one might a plant to examine its roots. For Paul Celan—for whom poetry was the grasp of the hand, a reaching across because a reaching toward, a reaching out over abyss that may be infinite even as one’s own body falls back in retreat away from the approaching other—poetry seeks a “reality it is also stricken by,” and the verb that speaks of the poem’s action is one that grasps to know, that pulls up from underneath to understand.
But what if there were a world in which the words one wrote become those traces by which others harmed your safety, your refuge, as the plow cuts in two the fieldmouse’s burrow? And the shadow, that You the poem addresses, that dear one called up from her far-wandering in the moor of the mind, memory-field buried in springtime snow—what if the words of the poem let her also be found, let others find the You you love so deeply that you write the poem that must be written which is the same poem as the one that must never exist. Then does You
slide across my mouth
midway through the words
I address to you, shadow,
to give you weight.
Does You herself bind the mouth that speaks her back into existence. Cut off the words whose utterance alone gives her weight again if not complete being. For then you can be found. You can be called out on the march. You can be in the snow bank by the river killed.
Again, now, and again.
“River” is one definition of shibboleth.
Only those who pronounce it right can cross the river to refuge.
To speak it is to show who you are.
Euphemism might be a means of survival.
Remind me: Is there another word for “river”?
In ancient Greek vase painting, the Gorgon alone looks out with both her eyes. All other figures, heroes and gods and goddesses, are painted in profile. Her gaze is the gaze of the one so real she is unreal, for this is what to see her with your own eyes does to you—not merely to become stone, but to be alive as a stone would be alive, insensate, merest appetite, dead to all but the merest hunger, merest sense, to see without looking, to hear without listening, a human that is left by her gaze not human.
It is shameless. She looks out at us as one from another world whose gaze breaks the boundary that keeps monstrous forces at bay. Sometimes our survival depends on this sense of shame by which we know to look away.
In class, the difficulty of Celan’s poems, discussing.
Sometimes the transitive verb speaks more truly when forced into becoming intransitive.
Only then do we feel the grasping within it, when it cannot reach the object it pursues, when sense is an approach but not an arrival.
Only then do we sense the shibboleth of our own speaking, when we feel we might be doing it wrong, this thing we do all the time, talking, thinking, writing grocery lists, writing poems. Or is it we learn to speak, to write, so that no one who reads the poem knows exactly how to say the words in it, and so that You brought up from shade into substance can live there in that field with the fieldmouse and be safe from the approach of any other but the one who says, I. Or is even that too much, and even I can’t know how to say the words of the poem, even those of the poem I wrote. Aren’t I the one who is the danger, plowing the blank field with my head, searching for the home I wreck by finding it. Or am I just one of the dangers, among many. Or is my refuge only found in that You whose only refuge is the poem.
I guess I don’t know.
All these questions that end in periods.
What we say to others we also say to ourselves. We hear the words we say; it can be no other way.
Pure shibboleth of the crippled boy saying over and again mass-klo, matisklo mass-klo matisklo. Maybe the word meant nothing at all, had no referent, not signification, he just wanted someone to tell him if he was saying it right, if he could be let in, deep inside the word, if he could cross the river of its utterance, where alone he might be safe from death. Mass-klo. Matisklo.
Every day I say thousands of words. So do you. O Gorgon, turn your head aside. Each one of them goes:
Sibboleth sibboleth shibboleth
Years ago I went to a museum. In it I learned that the Assyrians etched prayers onto the bricks with which they built their temples, and the façade in the museum proved it. I also learned that, not knowing from which direction the gods looked, they carved the same prayer on every face of the brick, including those cemented together, including that faced another wall.
In another room I looked at Sumerian and Egyptian seals. Carved from bone or ivory or stone, rolled across wet mud or dipped in ink and drawn across vellum, the images repeat as if forever. My favorite: a girl braiding her hair. First it’s loose, and then in plaits, and then a single braid; then, it’s loose again.
Vision of the daily as the afterlife.
So like but unlike the Gorgon’s art.
Celan quotes Georg Büchner: “Yesterday as I was walking along above the valley, I saw two girls sitting on a rock: one was putting up her hair, the other helping her; and the golden hair was hanging free, and the pale, solemn face, and yet so young, and the black peasant dress, and the other one so absorbed in her task. The finest, most heartfelt paintings of the Old German School scarcely convey an inkling of this. At times one wishes one were a Medusa’s head.”
Celan writes: “Poetry can mean a breathturn. Perhaps it travels the route—also the route of art—for the sake of such a breathturn? Perhaps it will succeed, as the strange, I mean the abyss and the Medusa’s head, the abyss and the automatons, seem to lie in this direction—perhaps it will succeed here to differentiate between strange and strange—perhaps it is exactly here that the Medusa’s head shrinks, perhaps it is exactly here that the automatons break down—for this single short moment?”
Medusa must hear the hissing of the snakes about her ears as white noise so constant it’s merely the drone of the world. No wonder she has to look at things to notice them fully. She gazes at what catches her eye and then it can catch her eye forever, exactly the same, every nuance of expression, posture of body, angle of fingers stretching out through her sister’s hair and also, every hair thinner than a thread, all stone the breeze blows through but does not move.
Or Gorgon-like to find those words that capture beauty and still it into image, to appreciate beauty, to make of it a thing others can find, removed from the world, infinitely
