Friday, April 2, 2010

Celan, Heidegger, Todtnauberg

Paul Celan was the name of Paul Ancel, a Rumanian Jew.  Unlike Slavo-phobe Heidegger, he learned Russian.

The poem Todtnauberg begins with the name of the flower Arnica, the Arnica montana of Linnaeus.  This is a flower of Central Europe; when found elsewhere, it has escaped.

The next word is "Augenbright", named by Linnaeus Euphrasia officinalis.

No reading of the poem can ignore these two choices, for Heidegger had mocked time and again the sciences of genus and species.

The attack on reason would place astrology on a footing - grounds - with astronomy.  Consider this. Was there a "dipper" attached by a chain to the water pump at Heidegger's well?

Astronomy has made us a great gift: careful measurement of motions over time - no matter how mocked by the Master - have revealed that the "Dipper" will not remain with that form eternally, for it is a loose cluster of stars passing through our neighbourhood and may be the best clue of the origins of our sun, her sisters long lost, un-nameable, in the multitude, unlike the sisters of Kafka, lost in that other procession.

Should we mock Leibniz for the mere technology of pumping water from the mines?  Should we mock the "School of Mines" for graduating a right-wing fanatic into French politics?

More than one Russian poet was linked to geology, but here we have the poet and botany (Germany long claimed parts of Denmark as their own.)

The appropriateness of names to named appears early in philosophy: and now, later, the Central European speakers of a "romance" language ask that we name them "Romanians" and not "Rumanians".

The word, "slovo" and fame, "slava", are linked to the feeble: "slabo" in the language that Heidegger did not learn - the language often free of the "copula", the "is".

To what extent Husserl's attack on Galileo in the name of "Lebenswelt" was an effort to respond to Heidegger on "Hantieren" that was not objectivized tekné is a painful subject and not the object of this note - this attention, here, surrounds the poet's two opening words, a series.

Steinwuerfel: the pump and the limitations imposed - as first known by Pascal - the vacuum - the limit - to any effort to raise clear, pure fluidity from the depths.

The stone cast, the die cast, the Centurians and the mantle - Schicksal, geschicht, geworfen, the yellow stars, Sterne, Arnika montana, of the open alpine field; Augentrost, the white stars of Central Europe, dense yellow suns at their core.  All of them, pseudo antheria, unlike the linden of the balanced trunk, symmetrical, but with the single bract.

for Robert Schwab of Freiburg U. and environmental justice, for the trip to the Martin-Heidegger-Weg with Herbert Korte, June 1985 (after the Kiel Weyl Centenary.)  the squab

Note: Sabu's pre-Linnaean collection is acquired by Peter I for his "Kunsthalle", east of Heidegger's lost Ost-Deutschen of Koenigsberg [Kaliningrad] - for what can become of "human Dasein" [das deutende Volk] without Ost Preussen?  Heidegger nowhere quotes Akhmatova of the City of Peter.

notes:
Stein, Kamen (russ.) Kamin (dtsch + russ)
Trunk - Pitb (russ) Glotok / Glossa
history, mines and wells: the fate of slaves to dig wells; Sterne in daylight from the well
Wuerfel - Kube (Kyb - russ) The sphere squared: the "cross" experiments of Heidegger's diagrams.
pagan, superstition, crafts, symbol: the Aryan cross, the star of David
the orphans in the woods ( Waisen / Syroti ) wessen Namen
das Buch der Hoffnung
Knueppel / Придерживаться / Băţ

2 comments:

KanjiRecog said...

Perhaps essential on Celan and Russian clues, I have since noted http://www2.dickinson.edu/glossen/heft6/celan.html

KanjiRecog said...

There is surely no need to recall with regard to names: when freed from camps (in Celan's case, by the Russians), the first thing the victims regained were their names in almost public space - not just a number and a barracks at Appel on the Appelplatz (many would still be held in DP camps later) - not only to be able to say that they yet lived but also where they were from - geographically and nationally (if only to the Red Cross.)