And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.
It is desire at the end of winter, when
It observes the effortless weather turning blue
.....
It knows that what it has is what not
And throws it away like a thing of another time
As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep.
-Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"
I owed to myself this post, dealing with the old question of translation - as it seems that for some of the "critical" philosophers translation was the only possible way to understand a poem and most of them were particularly concerned with poetry, more than they were with philosophy. Quoting statements by them will no longer help our discovery. But if we return to A. "not to have is the beginning of desire", and following her a little closer one can only suspect bridges to a manifold truth (instead of "to many truths") and unearthen a timely vessel containing many encounters that find themselves aloof from us only along the lines of time.
Translation plays a pivotal role in the question about the metaphysics of the experience (Benjamin) which in itself is dialectical and therefore tautological at one of the many open-ends. For Rosenzweig translation "transforms" the world - were we to have one of course, and for Steiner I think it is so much more beyond a transformation, it is not just a making of the world but simultaneously making it and unmaking it, just like the God of the Midrash created worlds and destroyed them over and over until he met Adam, but in creating the world he alienated himself, he stood in his throne all alone without all the beasts of the soil and waters to accompany him. From here we travel to Kafka's paradox: "Wirkliche realitaet ist immer unrealistisch".
Translation doesn't arise as an scholarly question, it isn't a quest for knowledge not for unconcealment - for it is only God who needs to unconceal himself, isn't it so? Translation is the desperate struggle for a contingently human response, translation isn't even a necessity, it is a photograph of an earthly life from a multi-dimensional plane in which the author can convey only one of the many hues possible which often turns into a white and black and blurry copy, it is not even a representation of reality but a copy of the representation. As soon as we speak of the representation it is temptatively symbolic therefore real, taking away all possible charm in the scene, for reality in order to become itself must de-realize itself into symbols which are possible only in nature, and seldom in language.
The language of "Modernity" recognizes its divorce from reality, "word from world" in terms of Steiner; and in this lies the struggle of Modernity, whose whole structural concept can be defined merely in terms of this struggle. This intellectual achievement is recognized as an achievement only in that is revolutionary, only that is a ground-breaking phenomenon in the whole of Western history; the dialectic divorce of God, men and the world provides us with the ground for one of the most generic terms to define "Modernity": The concept of "Krisis". In this sense Jaspers and Heidegger must have been right when they spoke about "The Age of Doubt", in which we're much closer to the Ancient Greeks - the root of the uninterchangeability and ever-recurring spontaneity of human action according to Jerome, idea with which I'm in the most absolute disagreement (and by using "absolute" sinning in being Hegelian), the early analytical and continental concern with a linguistic philosophy and the rise of linguistics itself is the most flamboyant proof of this awareness.
In the turn of a couple of decades following the fin-de-siecle and Weimar we find ourselves in Auschwitz; thereby language has no longer those creative properties to begin "anew", language must be re-invented instead of anti-invented - namely dialectically destructed and built anew from structural patterns, that are semantically empty units of worldliness, that is of artificial communication.
Here we turn to Goodman-Thau for some explanation about the quest of language after Auschwitz:
"Complaining to God is pointless here. There's no place for God in a world like this. He was banished, condemned, repudiated a long time ago. Here no voice is heard, no lamentation, no cry, everything is silent".
And with those lines Goodman-Thau carves an orifice in the enterprise of communication that is better expounded by Rachel Hodara:
"In general, in order to sleep, we long for silence. Yet there are certain kinds of silence that preclude sleep, silences that are cries of terror which – suffocated by pain and shame – strain to be heard. Among those who have suddenly been assaulted by this discovery, there are some who have chosen to quickly plug their ears; they cannot be blamed: they only wish to protect their sanity. Others plunge into the sounds, but do not perceive the words they are composed of. A few, very few, dare to decipher the words, to become participants not only in the pain but also in the knowledge and, thus, in the terror that unavoidably accompanies it, hand in hand."
As yet, reading into 1948 we're unable to go beyond the first suggestion - quickly plug our ears in order to protect our sanity. In that moment we're speaking in a language that isn't a language or a chain of symbols, we're speaking from within the impairedness of our mute symbols. Romain Rolland wrote to Stefan Zweig "Art can bring us consolation as individuals but is powerless before reality". This becomes the only possible reality, a de-poetized world. A world in which it isn't possible to turn to Rashi's dreamtext - which contains also realities that do not exclude the dreams, at least not immediately.
This despair can be journeyed through as though we were to enable what Barbara Galli said, firstly "denote an accessible or inaccessible throughway" and then "eyes that insistently see in the present", but we can't journey all alone, we need the help of the witnesses, first we'll turn to dawn with A.J Heschel and then to the twilight of dusk with Nelly Sachs. I will keep the original languages (Yiddish and German) in order to remain tightly bound to their impossibilities.
אין גאט נאך גלייבט גאט אליין...
מענטשן ליבן נאר זיך אליין.
חיות נעמען זיך דאס לעבן.
און ביי אלעמען צו שפאט איז עניוות און פארגעבן.
איז א ליד אזא דען מעגלעך?
מיליאנען ארבעטער אין גרובנס ראסטן און -- דולדן.
תהילים - קיינער בלעטערט, באקסערס ווערט פארגעטערט.
מענטש פארמשפט מענטש צו טויט.
מערדער מארדן, קינדער ליידן נויט.
איז א ליד אזא דען מעגלעך?
מענטשן ליבן נאר זיך אליין.
חיות נעמען זיך דאס לעבן.
און ביי אלעמען צו שפאט איז עניוות און פארגעבן.
איז א ליד אזא דען מעגלעך?
מיליאנען ארבעטער אין גרובנס ראסטן און -- דולדן.
תהילים - קיינער בלעטערט, באקסערס ווערט פארגעטערט.
מענטש פארמשפט מענטש צו טויט.
מערדער מארדן, קינדער ליידן נויט.
איז א ליד אזא דען מעגלעך?
גאט, ס'איז אזוי טרויעריק-שלעכט!
ס'זענען דורות געגענגען פאר אונדז
און געזייעט בלאנדזשעניש אויף וועגן.
איצט ווייסט מען נישט, וואס גוט איז, וואס רעכט...
(A.J. Heschel)
ס'זענען דורות געגענגען פאר אונדז
און געזייעט בלאנדזשעניש אויף וועגן.
איצט ווייסט מען נישט, וואס גוט איז, וואס רעכט...
(A.J. Heschel)
In this poem (because we're attempting to turn to poetry in order to infere philosophy) we can only read the stated problem, and now we can turn to a more prophetic verse with as little hope but with some sort of encouragment:
"Schweigend spricht der Stein
vom Martyrium der sechs Millionen
deren Leib verwandelt in Rauch
durch die Luft zog.
Schweigen, schweigen, schweigen.
Ihr Nachgeborenen
Gedenket der Maenner, Frauen, Kinder,
die in einer Zeit der Gewalt
Maertyrer wurden.
Neigt euer Haupt in Demut".
(Nelly Sachs)
Both of them are deliberately occupied with silence, Heschel is tragic and Sachs is prophetic or rather exhortative. As we awake into the province of language, I can add my two cents. But I need to start with Aviva again:
"... The worse thing you can do to somebody is not to make her scream in agony but to use that agony in such a way that even when the agony is over, she can't reconstitute herself. You can thereby "unmake her world" by making it impossible for her to use language to describe what she has been".
This is what she writes when speaking about the biblical Sarah, which doesn't differ much from Wang and Frankel, two Holocaust-psychotherapist; this gives A.'s reading a rather powerful insight which travels back and forth along the threads of time. Thus, when we read into the Rashi we forcefully unmake ourselves in order to be made anew, but in order to be made and not dis-unmade we need to recover the language from its exile.
It causes me terrible pangs of fear when at times I read old diaries of mine, I'm able to plunder into the words and search myself among those symbols. I'm very seldom able to speak about my own exile, but in particular attention to philosophical discourse I'm able to interact with the world-alienation of the thinker when I'm able to recognize his exile, his estrangement. I'm only reading into myself. That causes me extreme forms of frustration because I've most irreparably lost the mother tongue, it's gone forever with a good number of pasts; I've forcefully exiled her and exiled myself from her, because I'm unable to hearken to her kernel of murmurs about an unmade somebody, which could have been me as a child or toiling in puberty. The question of the language attacks me and deals me deadly blows every so often, so that translation is necessary, a translation that will enhance any possible communicability. Accordingly my skin has replaced the mother-tongue, in such way that I'm alienated from everything else. My desire is basically one of translation.
When I desire him only the signals of his vitality can call my attention and throw me despite myself into that pit of the waters that is just one step before the Ocean but never letting me totally drown, for the sake of the memory. As I walk past the same olden streets without quotations I seemly find those conversations fabricated in tissues in every corner, relentlessly I repeat them to myself, tirelessly even. I don't want to forget my lines, to obliterate the signals of my body that are representations of love and lust, anger and vision, but never the original feelings that have astrayed already for long with the mother tongue.
I drown into that pole of desire, I search after him through screens as though wistfully vanquishing from the symbolic imagination, wanting to make him so real that he can devoured with teeth and gawns by beasts with names given by Adam. In the impossibility and unwillingness to communicate we're building little worlds of glue that vanish soon thereafter and outlive themselves as to command a little resurrection, that often resembles an earthly redemption. I anger at myself. Impossibility is the only known root and channel for desire, at least until we will be able to re-marry world and word and to live in either.
But the impossibility of desire brings us to closer to re-write ourselves, as though his thighs were unseen pieces of lapilazuli available only under heavenly conditions and prayer shawls that cover the whole of the country side and uplift themselves around the city to allow our ashtreys to empty their clothes and our smells into the vacuum of sympathetic syntagms. This is the only way we have out of Auschwitz, the impossibility of desiring, the impossibility of the world.
"You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world: this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid" -Kafka
We await him in our timely erodes, in our time-bound homes. And as though this suffering were unavoidable (which Kafka has proved it is not) we cling onto the pattern and curdle into. Appropriating the events with the friendly attitude of nature:
Ερος δαυτ᾽ετιναζεν εμοι φρενας
ανεμος κατ᾽ορος δρυσιν εμπεσων. (Sappho)
In appropriating our suffering we haven't obliterated Auschwitz or created language anew, but we remain striving, witnessing, waiting, hoping. Like Korach, nude from dialectics and being heroes and villains at one go. In our language prisons we can read Levinas before we go silent totally:
"A man in prison continues to believe in an unrevealed future and invites one to work in the present for the most distant things, of which the present is an irrefutable negation... There's a very great nobility in an energy freed from the strangehold of the present".
And at that time, when we'll be able to return to language, we'll speak of our own speech just in the same way Adorno spoke of Kafka to Benjamin: "I claimed he represents a photograph of our earthly life from the perspective of a redeemed life, one which merely reveals the latter as an edge of black cloth, whereas the terrifying distance optics of the photographic image is none other than that of the obliquely angled camera itself".
But for those living in the world after Auschwitz it is perhaps a good thing we can't redeem this world, could you imagine this world being redeemed? What about our silences? Where will they go?
Perhaps when they themselves will become impossibilities before speech we'll be able to scream aloud the following poem of Gottfried Keller:
"When, someday, this misery
Like ice at length is broken,
We will speak about it
As we do the black death.
Children will set straw men
Upon the plain to burn;
Joy will come from this pain
And light from olden dread"
"Schweigend spricht der Stein
vom Martyrium der sechs Millionen
deren Leib verwandelt in Rauch
durch die Luft zog.
Schweigen, schweigen, schweigen.
Ihr Nachgeborenen
Gedenket der Maenner, Frauen, Kinder,
die in einer Zeit der Gewalt
Maertyrer wurden.
Neigt euer Haupt in Demut".
(Nelly Sachs)
Both of them are deliberately occupied with silence, Heschel is tragic and Sachs is prophetic or rather exhortative. As we awake into the province of language, I can add my two cents. But I need to start with Aviva again:
"... The worse thing you can do to somebody is not to make her scream in agony but to use that agony in such a way that even when the agony is over, she can't reconstitute herself. You can thereby "unmake her world" by making it impossible for her to use language to describe what she has been".
This is what she writes when speaking about the biblical Sarah, which doesn't differ much from Wang and Frankel, two Holocaust-psychotherapist; this gives A.'s reading a rather powerful insight which travels back and forth along the threads of time. Thus, when we read into the Rashi we forcefully unmake ourselves in order to be made anew, but in order to be made and not dis-unmade we need to recover the language from its exile.
It causes me terrible pangs of fear when at times I read old diaries of mine, I'm able to plunder into the words and search myself among those symbols. I'm very seldom able to speak about my own exile, but in particular attention to philosophical discourse I'm able to interact with the world-alienation of the thinker when I'm able to recognize his exile, his estrangement. I'm only reading into myself. That causes me extreme forms of frustration because I've most irreparably lost the mother tongue, it's gone forever with a good number of pasts; I've forcefully exiled her and exiled myself from her, because I'm unable to hearken to her kernel of murmurs about an unmade somebody, which could have been me as a child or toiling in puberty. The question of the language attacks me and deals me deadly blows every so often, so that translation is necessary, a translation that will enhance any possible communicability. Accordingly my skin has replaced the mother-tongue, in such way that I'm alienated from everything else. My desire is basically one of translation.
When I desire him only the signals of his vitality can call my attention and throw me despite myself into that pit of the waters that is just one step before the Ocean but never letting me totally drown, for the sake of the memory. As I walk past the same olden streets without quotations I seemly find those conversations fabricated in tissues in every corner, relentlessly I repeat them to myself, tirelessly even. I don't want to forget my lines, to obliterate the signals of my body that are representations of love and lust, anger and vision, but never the original feelings that have astrayed already for long with the mother tongue.
I drown into that pole of desire, I search after him through screens as though wistfully vanquishing from the symbolic imagination, wanting to make him so real that he can devoured with teeth and gawns by beasts with names given by Adam. In the impossibility and unwillingness to communicate we're building little worlds of glue that vanish soon thereafter and outlive themselves as to command a little resurrection, that often resembles an earthly redemption. I anger at myself. Impossibility is the only known root and channel for desire, at least until we will be able to re-marry world and word and to live in either.
But the impossibility of desire brings us to closer to re-write ourselves, as though his thighs were unseen pieces of lapilazuli available only under heavenly conditions and prayer shawls that cover the whole of the country side and uplift themselves around the city to allow our ashtreys to empty their clothes and our smells into the vacuum of sympathetic syntagms. This is the only way we have out of Auschwitz, the impossibility of desiring, the impossibility of the world.
"You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world: this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid" -Kafka
We await him in our timely erodes, in our time-bound homes. And as though this suffering were unavoidable (which Kafka has proved it is not) we cling onto the pattern and curdle into. Appropriating the events with the friendly attitude of nature:
Ερος δαυτ᾽ετιναζεν εμοι φρενας
ανεμος κατ᾽ορος δρυσιν εμπεσων. (Sappho)
In appropriating our suffering we haven't obliterated Auschwitz or created language anew, but we remain striving, witnessing, waiting, hoping. Like Korach, nude from dialectics and being heroes and villains at one go. In our language prisons we can read Levinas before we go silent totally:
"A man in prison continues to believe in an unrevealed future and invites one to work in the present for the most distant things, of which the present is an irrefutable negation... There's a very great nobility in an energy freed from the strangehold of the present".
And at that time, when we'll be able to return to language, we'll speak of our own speech just in the same way Adorno spoke of Kafka to Benjamin: "I claimed he represents a photograph of our earthly life from the perspective of a redeemed life, one which merely reveals the latter as an edge of black cloth, whereas the terrifying distance optics of the photographic image is none other than that of the obliquely angled camera itself".
But for those living in the world after Auschwitz it is perhaps a good thing we can't redeem this world, could you imagine this world being redeemed? What about our silences? Where will they go?
Perhaps when they themselves will become impossibilities before speech we'll be able to scream aloud the following poem of Gottfried Keller:
"When, someday, this misery
Like ice at length is broken,
We will speak about it
As we do the black death.
Children will set straw men
Upon the plain to burn;
Joy will come from this pain
And light from olden dread"
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