microliths 240-241 | 246 by Paul Celan, English translation by Pierre Joris. (Excerpts)

____________

[These are Celan’s first notes toward the conference project 
“On the Darkness of Poetry”  which remained unfinished.] 

Pjoris


240

         240.1
         ||  Mysticism as wordlessness
	     Poetry as form


241.2 The poem is inscribed as the figure of the whole language, 
but language remains  invisible; what is actualizing itself — 
language — steps, as soon as it has happened, back into the realm of 
the possible.“Le poème,” writes Valéry, “est du langage à l’état
naissant;” /“Poetry,” writes Valéry, “is language in the state 
of being born;”/ Language in statu nascendi, thus, language freeing 
itself.


241

241.1	Yesyes, not only the Geiger-, the “syllable-counters ” too, 
though despised by a literature that calls itself engaged, 
register something.


————————————
      ↑

     →  241.2  


aesthesis is not enough; the …	;noesis is not enough; 	         …		  
               ;  what’s needed is personal presence, 
what’s needed is conversation; 
conversation and entertainment are different things; conversations 
are demanding,  straining.



241.3 ——–——–
Idea of the bracket			(voicedness)	 
syncope
			also the this vibrato of the words has se-
			mantic relevance


241.4 ______

The poet: always in partibus infidelium




241.5 ______


          Das      Kampaner Tal, p. 51, footnote:
                          ↓
||... “as on the Jews’ houses (in memory of ruined Jerusalem), 
something  always 		  has to be left unfinished.” 

	   to     remember in the poem — remembrance as absence — 



241.6				Language planes

	||   
                   Nationallibr.: Bühler —



241.7

______


No syllogistic enriched with this or that theory of association, no 
logistic will ever be able to do justice to the fact of “poem” — the 
alleged thought- or language-scheme of the poem is never “finished.” 


______

241.8	


syntactic (and other!) bracketings 

______


241.9

Oppositeness? 

______


241.10

Multivocity

______


241.11


139. Psalm:         nox illuminatio mea 

	      ... darkness is like the light 


246


246.1			 an uneasiness similar to that in
“Lyrik-Dichtung)			relation to the word
				→  “Schrifttum / literature”

 The uneasiness	    Lyrik		(which Heine
 the progress therein		     uses…)

Tension between Lyrik = Dichtung


Questions	Lyric Poetry
“Problems of Poetry”

246.2	We live in a brightly lit time, a time that illustrates 
everything; lyric poetry has a cosmopolitan trait: “Felice notte!” 
our so beneficially contradictory god poetizes. Benn…



246.3	_______



The secret marriage the word contracts in the poem with the real and 
the true is called “wild” mainly by those who do not want to forgo 
their lushly comfortable, well-guarded culture-harem and — especially
 — the eunuchal services that come with it. 
(Poetry certainly does not threaten this seraglio with any kind of 
abduction)


246.3  The — oh so wordily lamented — loss of tradition: the 
legitimism of those who “legitimize” themselves everywhere, 
so as not to have to justify themselves to themselves.