All Candled Things
AS A CHILD Paul Celan liked to draw burning candles. To capture with pen and ink the successive phases of flame and extinction preoccupied him intensely.1 “I did not love it, I loved its burning down and you know I haven’t loved anything since,” says his protagonist Klein near the end of Conversation in the Mountains. To witness the mortal flame, burning and burning down, is a poet’s work. Celan refers to this work, in a poem written on his birthday in 1967, as:
Lesestationen im Spätwort,
Sparflammenpunkte
am Himmel. …2
[Reading stations in the late word,
saving flamepoints
in the sky. …]
Whom do “saving flamepoints” (Sparflammenpunkte) save? Perhaps themselves. The German verb sparen means “to be thrifty.” And Lesestationen im Spätwort plays upon the term Spätlese, a “late gleaning” of ripe grapes. Certainly Celan knew better than anyone how to go about gleaning the word. Yet in the end he despaired of the task. On the day he took his own life by drowning (April 20, 1970), he left open on his desk a biography of Hölderlin with part of a sentence underlined:
Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the well of the heart.3
In a poem written some weeks earlier, he seems to describe his own sinking down:
ihm ins Gesicht und drüber
hinaus,
langsam löschte ein Brand
[The eternities drove at
his face and
beyond it,
slowly a fire extinguished
all candled things. …]
We cannot assimilate this despair but we should study it. For a poet’s despair is not just personal; he despairs of the word and that implicates all our hopes. Every time a poet writes a poem he is asking the question, Do words hold good? And the answer has to be yes: it is the contrafactual condition upon which a poet’s life depends. We have looked at the ways in which this condition informs ancient Greek attitudes to poets and poetry—built into Homer’s blindness and Simonides’ avarice, sleepshaped in the story of Danaë, deathcolored on the ship of Theseus, quickchanging as a longwinged fly, sudden as a collapsed roof. We have seen Simonides estranged from his fellows on account of this condition; we have seen him recognize, resent and negotiate his estrangement; we have seen him transform it into a poetic method of luminous and precise economy. We have not seen him despair.
Simonides’ lack of despair is noteworthy. Do words hold good for him? Yes they do and, on the basis of this goodness, he invented a genre of poetry.
Epinikion means “upon the occasion of a victory.” It is the Greek name for a formal praise poem, or epinician ode, in honor of a victor in the athletic games. The Olympic Games were the most illustrious of these athletic occasions, held at Olympia every four years and attended by people from all over the Greek world. But many other ancient cities (including Delos, Corinth and Nemea) had contests and held festivals to celebrate victors. Epinician odes were part of these celebrations. The odes were given in choral performance—combining music, song and dance—to an audience that might include the victor, his kinsmen, fellow competitors, fellow citizens and other spectators. It would be hard to overestimate the social, ethical and epistemological importance of these performances to the community in which they took place. Indeed community is constituted by such acts. Games are for winners. They stand alone. Community comprises all the rest of us, who do not win, but watch and recognize the victor’s separate struggle, finding a way to praise it. Praise poetry addresses itself to an individual who has chosen to test the limits of human possibility and momentarily succeeded. His flame is burning very bright. Looking at it we feel both love and hate. Hate because he has surpassed us, love because his light falls on our hopes, enlarging them. Ancient Greek epinician poets are candid about the natural human ambivalence that greets excellence in other people, and they take seriously their own function of counter-balancing private emotion with communal reasoning. The poet’s voice pulls order out of agonistic chaos and forms it into an object of common delight. So Pindar says:
ἐγὼ δ᾿ ἀστοῖς ἁδὼν …
αἰνέων αἰνητά, μομϕὰν δ᾿ ἐπισπείρων ἀλιτροῖς.5
[I cheer my townspeople …
because I praise what is praiseworthy
and scatter blame on the unrighteous.]
Pindar’s ability to praise and blame depends on the goodness of his words. He has to know the difference between praiseworthy and blameworthy action; he has to name it. This saves the community, like rain, Pindar says:
τέθμιόν μοι ϕαμὶ σαϕέστατον ἔμμεν
τάνδ᾿ ἐπιστείχοντα νᾶσον ῥαινέμεν εὐλογίαις.6
[I say it is a necessary and absolutely lucid law
that I come to this island and rain the water of praise on it.]
Now Pindar is certainly the most famous epinician poet of the Greek tradition. But he was not the first. Tradition ascribes the invention of this genre to Simonides of Keos. There are fragmentary remains of Simonidean victory odes honoring winners in sprinting, wrestling, boxing, pentathlon, chariot racing and mule racing. These pieces are, for the most part, brief and dull. Simonides shows but a dim interest in athletes or prizes. The concept of praise itself, however, stirs him profoundly. In a long poem that is arguably the most difficult of his oeuvre, he entertains the question, Do words of praise hold good? And answers it with a poetic action—precisely the action we saw recommended by Paul Celan—he “measures off the area of the given and the possible”:7
ἄνδρ᾿ ἀγαθὸν μὲν ἀλαθέως γενέσθαι
χαλεπὸν χερσίν τε καὶ ποσὶ καὶ νόωι
τετράγωνον ἄνευ ψόγου τετυγμένον·
[ ]
οὐδέ μοι ἐμμελέως τὸ Пιττάκειον
νέμεται, καίτοι σοϕοῦ παρὰ ϕωτὸς εἰ-
ρημένον· χαλεπὸν ϕάτ᾿ ἐσθλὸν ἔμμεναι.
θεὸς ἄν μόνος τοῦτ᾿ ἔχοι γέρας, ἄνδρα δ᾿ οὐκ
ἔστι μὴ οὐ κακὸν ἔμμεναι,
ὃν ἀμήχανος συμϕορὰ καθέληι·
πράξας γὰρ εὖ πᾶς ἀνὴρ ἀγαθός,
κακὸς δ᾿ εἰ κακῶς
[ἐπὶ πλεῖστον δὲ καὶ ἄριστοί εἰσιν
οὓς ἄν οἰ θεοὶ ϕιλῶσιν.]
τοὔνεκεν οὔ ποτ᾿ ἐγὼ τὸ μὴ γενέσθαι
δυνατὸν διζήμενος κενεὰν ἐς ἄ-
πρακτον ἐλπίδα μοῖραν αἰῶνος βαλέω,
πανάμωμον ἄνθρωπον, εὐρυεδέος ὅσοι
καρπὸν αἰνύμεθα χθονός·
πάντας δ᾿ ἐπαίνημι καὶ ϕιλέω,
ἑκὼν ὅστις ἔρδηι
μηδὲν αἰσχρόν· ἀνάγκαι
δ᾿ οὐδὲ θεοὶ μάχονται.
[ ]
[οὐκ εἰμὶ ϕιλόψογος, ἐπεὶ ἔμοιγε ἐξαρκεῖ
ὃς ἄν μὴ κακὸς ἦι] μηδ᾿ ἄγαν ἀπάλαμνος εἰ-
δώς γ᾿ ὀνησίπολιν δίκαν,
ὑγιὴς ἀνήρ· οὐδὲ μή μιν ἐγὼ
μωμήσομαι· τῶν γὰρ ἠλιθίων
ἀπείρων γενέθλα.
πάντα τοι καλά, τοῖσίν
[Hard to become truly a good man
in hands and feet and mind
built four-square without blame.
Now if you ask me, the old saying of Pittakos does not
define its terms properly although
said by a wise man: hard (he says) to be good.
The fact is, God alone could have this privilege.
Man cannot but be bad
if the misfortune machine pulls him down.
Yes sure, every man is good when things are good
and bad when things are bad
(and in general the best are the ones
whom the gods love).
So never shall I go searching after what cannot come into being
anyhow—throwing the space of my life down empty in actionless hope—
an All Blameless Man
among those of us who feed on the food of the earth
(but if I find one I’ll send you the news).
I praise and love anyone
whoever willingly does
nothing ugly. Necessity
not even gods fight.
No I do not like blaming. Because for me it’s enough
if someone is other than bad—not too much out of hand,
conscious at least of the justice that helps the city,
a healthy man. No I shall not
lay blame. Because fools
are a species that never ends.
All things, you know, are beautiful with which
ugly things are not mixed.]
Do words of praise hold good? Yes, Simonides maintains, if a real poet measures them out. How do we know who is a real poet? The poet tells us. The commodity that Simonides put on sale when he invented epinician form, the commodity he is advertising in this poem, is his own unique ability to define the boundaries of human praiseworthiness. He must make us believe in this ability before we can hear his praise. He goes about it (characteristically) by a poetic movement from negative to positive. He sets out all the criteria that do not constitute grounds for praise, in order to excise them dramatically and leave his own truth obvious. He excises the legendary sage Pittakos, who failed to draw accurate boundaries (νέμεται, 12) around his concept of the good man. He excises the gods who are simply incommensurable with human boundaries (14, 19–20). He excises the race of fools, who are coextensive with boundlessness (ἀπείρων, 38). What remains is his own measured action of praise and love. “I praise and I love,” he says, “whoever willingly does nothing ugly” (27–28).
Simonides’ poem is not a poem about good, evil, gods, men or Pittakos so much as it is a poem about Simonides’ own epinician necessity, which he establishes in sixteen negative and double-negative formulations, culminating in the ruthless declaration: “All things are beautiful into which ugly things are not mixed.” Ruthless because, unless you are one of the species of fools that never ends, you know the human condition is an irretrievably mixed one. All our ambitions submit to this flaw. Our beauties turn base on a dime. We are not four-square. Gods fail to love us. The All Blameless Man turns out not to exist. So where can we go for news of truth? To words. The poet’s words remain. His words hold good. In words he knows how to clear away everything ugly, blameworthy, incommensurable or mad and manifest what is worth praise. He can minister to the flame. Gods alone have the power to keep themselves burning. All candled things need a Simonides.
Who needs a Celan? It would be an understatement to say the function of praise is denied to the modern poet. Not only because all epistemological authority to define a boundary between blameworthy and praiseworthy action has been withdrawn from him, but because the justice and health of his community are regarded as beyond redemption. In the ancient view, when clear lines are not drawn between praise and blame, the moral life of the community is confused and befouled; epinician diction typically uses images of darkness, shadow and smoke to represent this condition of social defilement.9 For example, in this epinician fragment attributed to Simonides:
τό τ]ε καλὸν κρίνει τὸ τ᾿ αἰσχρόν· εἰ δέ
… κ]ακαγορεῖ τις ἄθυρον [σ]τόμα
περι]ϕέρων, ὁ μὲν καπνὸς ἀτελής, ὁ δέ[
χρυ]σὸς οὐ μιαίνετ[α]ι,
ἁ δ᾿] ἀλάθε[ι]α παγκρατής·10
[[The poet]
differentiates beautiful from ugly: but … if
someone speaks [evil]
broadcasting from a mouth that has no door on it,
the smoke is a blurred and boundless thing.
Yet gold does not become defiled.
And truth is totally strong.]
Simonides associates truth, gold, purity and the ethical discriminations of the poet, over against the “broadcasting” of someone whose evil speech defiles the community like smoke and blurs the real edges of things. Although the fragment is incomplete, we can see its concern to denounce unclarity as an agent of evil and to valorize the praise poet against a background of righteousness. Consider, in contrast, Paul Celan’s use of similar raw materials—smoke, gold, purity and the ethical discriminations of the poet—in a poem from 1965 whose standpoint is the antithesis of praise:
ÜPPIGE DURCHSAGE
in einer Gruft, wo
wir mit unsern
Gasfahnen flattern,
im Geruch
der Heiligkeit, ja.
Brenzlige
Jenseitsschwaden
treten uns dick aus den Poren,
in jeder zweiten
Zahn-
karies erwacht
eine unverwüstliche Hymne.
Den Batzen Zwielicht, den du uns reinwarfst,
komm, schluck ihn mit runter.11
[RICH BROADCAST
in a grave, where
we with our
gasflags float,
we stand here
in the odor
of sanctity, yes.
Burnt
beyondsmoke
comes thick from our pores,
in every other
tooth-
cavity awakes
an unravageable hymn.
Two-bit twilight that you tossed in to us,
come, gulp it down too.]
Gold is gone from the mouths of these speakers. Their broadcast smoke is a deathgas that leaks from every pore, inadvertent blame of beings befouled in their essence and their history. Clarity, even of physiological boundaries, is denied them. To differentiate beauty from ugliness is a function no poet could administer here; no ontology of measure can order, cleanse or salvage this community. In fact the poet is absent from the poem until its scathing final sentence, when his subjects of song instruct him to swallow down his own two-bit poetic comment. Truth is not mentioned.
In the ancient world, people inaugurated contests and trials of prowess and strength, like the Olympic Games, to provide a location where human excellence could manifest itself and so become a subject of song, as burning entails flame. Modernity devises different ordeals. Here life and death are not merely analogically present. Burning occurs. Gold is real. Smoke is literal.12 And it becomes harder (perhaps too hard) for poetry to hold its own. As Simonides once said, “Seeming does violence even to the truth.”13 Do poets still watch the flame burn down? But to praise it is a gratuitous act, like throwing coins onto a pyre.
On the other hand, the economy of the unlost always involves gratuity. Whether you call it a waste of words or an act of grace depends on you. It is typical of Celan (and would have made sense to Simonides) to place at the center of his poem a negative space, the tooth cavity, so that we pay attention to what fills it: unverwüstliche Hymne, “unravageable hymn.” Is this phrase ironic and more than hopeless? Or does Celan believe of the hymn (what Simonides believes of gold) that it “does not become defiled?”
Celan did not often talk of hymns but he does mention Hölderlin, whose Hymns inspired him all his life. The poem he wrote after visiting Hölderlin’s tower in Tübingen poses in pure form the question, Do words hold good?14
TÜBINGEN, JÄNNER
Zur Blindheit über-
redete Augen.
Ihre—“ein
entsprungenes”—, ihre
Erinnerung an
schwimmende Hölderlintürme, môwen-
umschwirrt.
Besuche ertrunkener Schreiner bei
diesen
tauchenden Worten:
Käme,
käme ein Mensch,
käme ein Mensch zur Welt, heute, mit
dem Lichtbart der
Patriarchen: er dürfte,
spräch er von dieser
Zeit, er
dürfte
nur lallen und lallen,
immer-, immer-
zuzu.
(“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)
[TÜBINGEN, JANUARY
Eyes talked over
to blindness.
Their—“a
riddle is the purely
originated”—, their
memory of
swimming Hölderlintowers, gull-
whirred.
Visits of drowned joiners to
these
diving words:
Came,
came a man,
came a man to the world, today, with
the lightbeard of
the prophets: he could,
if he spoke of this
time, he
could
only stammer and stammer,
over-, over-
againagain.
(“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)]
The poem is a praise of Hölderlin. It begins with his “riddle” and ends with his Pallaksch. Both quotations are taken from the world of words that held good for him. “A riddle is the purely originated” comes from his Rhine hymn, and Pallaksch Pallaksch is a term he liked to utter in his late years to mean “sometimes yes, sometimes no.”15 He was mad in his late years; you can call Pallaksch nonsense. Yet a few pages ago we read and made sense of Celan’s admonition, “Keep Yes and No unsplit.” A word for “Yes and No” might be useful. Poets keep coming up with these useful inventions; we have seen both Celan and Simonides contructing a word for “Yes and No” out of the operations of the negative, out of the collocation of visibles and invisibles, out of the absent presence of gods in human rooms, out of alchemy, out of memory, out of the rules for elegiac meter and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, out of strangeness, hospitality, sleep, prayer and commodity exchange. But to be useful, poetic invention has to measure itself against the words that are given and possible, has to tease itself out of the unknown through a language mesh where everything ugly, blameworthy, incommensurable or mad is filtered out. Remarkable how Celan brings Hölderlin through the language mesh, riddle and all.
“A riddle is the purely originated.” In its context, this sentence begins the fourth strophe of Hölderlin’s Der Rhein and can be read backward or forward. Origin as riddle. Riddle as origin. Like the source of the Rhine, pure origin is hard to specify. “Even poetry can scarcely unveil it,” says the poet. I suspect Celan likes the pun that informs Hölderlin’s riddle. His line breaks and word division emphasize the parts of Hölderlin’s German word Reinentsprungenes, which means “purely originated” but also sounds like “Rhine-originated” and perhaps even suggests “Der Rhein-originated.” Pure source, the river Rhine and the poem “Rhine” come together on a point from which rich sense flows. If language were a commerce, punning would be its usury. Aristotle tells us that usury is the most unnatural sort of wealth-getting because it allows money to breed money out of itself instead of being spent as it was intended.16 Analogously, punning generates an unnatural supplement of significance from a sound that properly expends itself in one meaning alone.
If meaning were expenditure, this riddle would not be cheap. Many a poet or patriarch has paid with his eyes for the privilege of wasting words. Celan implies Hölderlin’s place in the tradition with a long repetitive conditional sentence (Käme … zuzu) that ends in a burst of Hölderlin’s private language. Now a private language is a kind of riddle. It raises the same problem of pure origin: you cannot get behind the back of it. Pallaksch Pallaksch is its own clue. On the other hand, from Hölderlin’s point of view, Pallaksch Pallaksch may be an utterance that captures the whole of the truth, purely originated. Celan allows for this possibility when he cites the phrase in brackets—that silent veil he likes to throw around his own riddles. Remember
(Did you know me,
hands? I went
the forked way you showed, my mouth
spat its gravel, I went, my time
wandering watches, threw its shadow—did you know me?)
from “Matière de Bretagne”? Remember
(Were I like you. Were you like me.
Stand we not
We are strangers.)
from “Sprachgitter”? Remember, too, Simonides’ Danaë gazing on the face of her infant deep in its purple blanket, mysterious bit of pure origin.
But if to you τὸ δεινόν were τὸ δεινόν,
you would lend your small ear
to what I am saying,
she says. Danaë frames her child in a contrafactual condition that is also a tautology; she seems to stammer. By his face she sees that the child is gone to another world and she does not know its language. Her Greek word τὸ δεινόν can only repeat itself on the surface of his sleep, like someone knocking on silence in search of a sound. Celan frames Hölderlin in a repetitive and ambiguous condition (“If a man came … he could only stammer”). This sentence may be contrafactual, it may not. The subjunctive verbs are vaguely futural, yet anchored to the present time in heute (“today”). Like Simonides, Celan is measuring off the area within which words hold good. It is a limited area. An unthinkable good. It comes up against silence. Celan searches into the silence. He lays his ear to the border of that other world: here comes a sound from Hölderlin’s side. Two sharp knocks. “Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”
Every praise poem is a presentiment of itself—a neologism that throws itself forward in song to whoever will complete it by seeing and hearing it, by taking it into their mind or heart. A praise poet has to construct fast, in the course of each song, this community that will receive the song. He does so by presuming it already exists and by sustaining a mood of witness that claims to be shared primordially between poet and community but in fact occurs within his words. The witnessing of what is praiseworthy is prior in him to praiseworthy acts, as he is prior to the community that will acclaim him its poet and so invent itself. There is something riddling in this. Whoever we are once invented, he is already there, watching the flame burn down.
His priority is like a private wealth. He administers it unevenly, now lavish, now stingy. Why are neologisms disturbing? If we cannot construe them at all, we call them mad. If we can construe them, they raise troubling questions about our own linguistic mastery. We say “coinages” because they disrupt the economic equilibrium of words and things that we had prided ourselves on maintaining. A new compound word in Celan, for example, evokes something that now suddenly seems real, although it didn’t exist before and is attainable through this word alone.17 It comes to us free, like a piece of new air. And (like praise) it has to prepare for itself an ear to hear it, just slightly before it arrives—has to invent its own necessity. Celan calls such things “breathcoin” (die Atemmünze).18 If breath were coin, the poet might not have drowned. Some people think Celan’s death is prefigured in the stammering words of “Tübingen, Jänner,” as if he were already there: watching it. He stands at a border of whiteness. Facing away from us. Blind to the color of our sail.
Is blindness a defect?
Not always.
Is stammering a waste of words?
Yes and No.
1 Chalfen (1991), 68.
2 Celan (1983), 2:324.13–15; (1988), 312–13.13–15.
3 Felstiner (1995), 287.
4 Celan (1983), 2:283.1–5; (1988), 298–99.1–5.
5 Pindar Nemeans 8.38–39.
6 Pindar Isthmians 6.20.
7 See above, Chapter III, n. 16.
8 Simonides fr. 542 PMG; Plato Protagoras 340A–348A. The text is problematic; there may be missing verses here and there, or passages of paraphrase masquerading as quotation. The possibility has occurred to me that Plato made the poem up. At any rate, it has no separate manuscript tradition, having been preserved for us only in a Platonic conversation between Sokrates and the sophist Protagoras, each of whom uses the poem as material for literary critical exercises of escalating brilliance. Neither Protagoras nor Sokrates seems very interested in what Simonides was really trying to say in his poem; the text is a means to an end for them. But I wonder about the innocence of Plato’s editorial choice. Certainly Simonides, held accountable by the Greeks for professionalizing the art of poetry, provides a worthy analogue to Protagoras the sophist, who supported himself by marketing traditional wisdom in prose and invented the trade of the professional educator. Moreoever, both Protagoras and Simonides won for their pains a solid reputation of avarice, penury and greed. Protagoras is reputed to have made more money than Pheidias, the most famous sculptor of his day, or ten other sculptors put together. Plato and others remark on this: like Simonides, the sophist gave people a shock by putting a price on a commodity previously called “wisdom” or “truth.” Remember, too, the best known of Protagoras’ sayings: “Man is the measure of all things, both of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.” Simonides would almost certainly have looked upon Protagorean relativism as naive or impious; nonetheless, his own portfolio as an epinician poet (as he establishes it in fr. 542) rests on a strong claim to be able to take the measure of a man. What a happy accident that these two calibrators converge in a Platonic dialogue whose philosophic point is something Sokrates calls “an art of measure that can save your life.” History would be a very strange thing if it contained no accidents, Marx reminds us.
9 E.g., Pindar Nemeans 1.24–25, 7.61–63.
10 Simonides fr. 541.1–9 PMG. So originally ascribed by Lobel and Turner (1959), 91–94, but the matter remains controversial; Loyd-Jones (1961) and Bowra (1963) argue for Bakkhylidean authorship. See also Donlan (1969); Treu (1960).
11 Celan (1983), 2:192; Felstiner (1995), 235.
12 Smoke has a distinct history as symbol, and as degradation of symbol, in Jewish literature: see Fackenheim (1978), 261–63.
13 Simonides fr. 598 PMG, and above.
14 Celan (1983), 2:226.
15 According to Hölderlin’s biographer, Christoph Theodor Schwab; first noted by Böschenstein (1968), 180.
16 Aristotle Politics 1258b.
17 Neumann (1968), 10.
18 In the poem “Le Contrescarpe” occur these verses: Brich dir die Atemmünze heraus / aus der Luft um duch und den Baum (“Break the breathcoin out / of the air that is around you and around the tree”): Celan (1983), 1:282.