Poetic proof that Sachs and Celan are my genetic parents
John Bjarne Grover
I made a 'paradise model' for a goodness-driven economy wherein I postulated four parameters:
1. Goodness (donation principle)
2. Bit-reversal (distribution principle)
3. Arbitrarity (poetic observation)
4. Opening subsets of humanity (creating economic value)
These are what should provide for the mechanics in the paradise model. The arbitrarity module is about the essential communication between the individual and the global consciousness and is that which creates economic value. Typically, an earthquake (seismic data) is a 'bit-reversal' and its semantics applies to a subset of humanity - distributed over the globe, indexible by a binary-notated number - and recognizable in a poetic observation: When that poetic observation is donated to the global consciousness, it opens the subset whose distribution is defined by the seismic data. That should create economic value - which stems from the communication between the individual and the global community. It is this communication which can be made the basis for intergalactic communication when only the principle of copyright (which means crediting the source, not delimiting the spread of the information) be allowed to give rise to a new substance of knowledge.
Pondering the depths in this articulation, one comes to the conclusion that a poetic observation does not have a good reason. A secret agent has a 'good reason', but secret agency is not poetic and not goodness-driven. Hence one cannot find a principled way to put together poetic observations for creating such economic value. In particular, one cannot copy from a source without crediting the source and hope that this will create value in this economy. The principle of arbitrarity means that whenever one has a reason for a poetic observation, one should specify the reason - which implies even crediting sources of logic and reasoning. "If I have a reason, I will tell you what it is".
The muse is the result of this attitude. Put differently: If I tell you the reasons I have for my poetry, my secrets of the poetic craft, so to speak, then the muse will tell her secrets to me. I do not know the reasons which the muse can have for telling me so-and-so, and I cannot provide a better reason for a poetic observation in my poetry than "the muse told me so". Which means that it was articulated in me as a poetic observation. It means an act of poetic logic - by which one can look through the poetic telescope. The more reason-less, the more it is in the universals, which means that it has an other-ness which gives it the quality of another being - the muse.
The muse is a divine sort of being. That means that arbitrarity is about the relation between the human and the divine. The human asks what this means and the gods answer. And perhaps the gods ask what this means and the human answers.
My 'Endmorgan Quartet', 'Birds to Saladin', 'A saga Hume' and these works are about such poetic observation. I have no reason whatsoever for the articulation of a line there. It is I who have written it, no doubt about it, but I don't have a reason for it. Could be the reason can be found by searching in my everyday experience, and I certainly do find such traces if I start searching, but there is no principled or experientally based reason why I write such as I do when I write it. Nevertheless, it has happened over and over again that I have written a book in this way and then find (afterwards) that it constitutes a parallel to a holy text - which has been guiding for the community's cultural narrative and its history through centuries. However, the finding of a surprisingly parallel text does not mean that this is the only parallel - nor that it is the essential parallel. The more universal a poetic narrative, the more will it find parallel texts to itself.
These poetic observations do not have a good reason in a sensory impression. It is not that I have seen somebody go through a door and then put two and two together for making a poetic conclusion from it. The three first poems in the article 'Four Bergen poems' on this website are such sensory observations from Bergen: I had been out walking, seen something and formulated it in a short poetic form. That is the 'Al Qaida' principle. It is about WHen, WHere, WHo and WHence (cp. such things as Chomsky's WH-movement). Such observations based on sensory impressions (for which the speed of light is the upper limit for information transfer) are about administration. It is in the scope of the power of administration who goes through which door at which time, and where s/he is going.
Anything can be put together by way of the 'keys' - which in actual fact constitute a Fast Fourier Transform for linking thought to signals and vice versa. The keys are a sort of distribution principle and seem to constitute the missing link between the sensation of the alphabet (based on the speech signal's vibrations against the eardrum) and the computer technology for modelling the changes and states of the global consciousness.
In my study of Celan's "Späte Gedichtsammlung", I have showed how it is about the relation between the power of administration (in the first 15 poems - I notice the earthquake in Peru that followed Celan's 1970 death after his 1968 book, being the 16th deadliest quake in known history) and the arbitrary observations from poem 16 onwards running in parallel with a 'holy text' - which here is Nelly Sachs' "Glühende Rätsel", book I, from the early sixties.
The proof I could bring that none of these poets were secret agents for the power of administration rests on that compositional principle in Celan's book. It is in terms of the link between the 'holy text' poem of Sachs and the poetic interpretation of it in Celan's poem which is about the recursive principles that link his own poem to Sachs'. It is that recursive principle which is the poem itself. First Sachs' poem:
Ich wasche meine Wäsche
Viel Sterben im Hemd singt
da und dort Kontrapunkt Tod
Die Verfolger haben ihn mit der Hypnose
eingefädelt
und der Stoff nimmt willig auf im Schlaf -
In my 'intermediating' poem, it is, just as in Sachs's poem, the body-space which is recursive. That can be explained by way of the distributional principle of the 'keys' which constitute the grid of my poem. It is the socalled 'star' (as I call it, see e.g. my "Time and the sonnet") structure, where the lines are composed of elements permuted from the 8 columns. Each column permutes the one to its left in the same way (which is the FFT flowgraph which can be traced to the 'keys' as a general cognitive principle):
| 1 | 1 | 1 | - | 1 |
| 2 | 4 | 8 | - | 2 |
| 3 | 5 | 7 | - | 3 |
| 4 | 8 | 2 | - | 4 |
| 5 | 7 | 3 | - | 5 |
| 6 | 6 | 6 | - | 6 |
| 7 | 3 | 5 | - | 7 |
| 8 | 2 | 4 | - | 8 |
An interesting poetic form is the rhyme ABCB CACB or even ABCB CDCB. It can be generalized to the traditional ABAB CDCD.
The fourth column is optional and is in any case a repeat of the first. The reason why it is conveniently maintained as a part of the form - and hence lending a comparable fundamental importance to the fifth column of the sonnet structure in the 'keys to heaven', is found in the second-order transform which obtains when these 4 x 8 = 32 words read horizontally are converted into a vertical column and the same permutational transform is carried out in another 5-6 columns. When the resulting lines are inspected, one finds that there is a limited number of rhymes. Just like lines 2, 4 and 8 = subset B contain the same elements, which again differ from lines 3, 5 and 7 = subset C, there is a total of only 8 different such subsets in the permutation of the 32-element columns. These subsets are the following, numbered from 1 to 8 in their order of first occurrence:
| 1. | 1 | ||||
| 2. | 2 | 4 | 8 | 16 | 32 |
| 3. | 3 | 5 | 9 | 17 | 31 |
| 4. | 6 | 12 | 24 | 18 | 30 |
| 5. | 7 | 13 | 25 | 15 | 29 |
| 6. | 10 | 20 | 26 | 14 | 28 |
| 7. | 11 | 21 | 23 | 19 | 27 |
| 8. | 22 |
Now the above 8-liner can be rewritten by replacing element number with corresponding class number in this subset ordering. That gives the following 'star' structure from this higher-order permutation:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 2 |
| 3 | 6 | 7 | 4 |
| 5 | 6 | 5 | 2 |
| 3 | 4 | 7 | 6 |
| 7 | 8 | 7 | 4 |
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 6 |
| 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
The following poem - with its high relevance for Sachs' poem - is written over such a form:
In the autumn dark my days grow shorter.
In the white river I wash at night.
My shirt breathes in the silent water,
in its blue and stone mausoleum of light.
The shirt is the tent of my soul.
A single half-moon writes in the river
as I wash the meanings out. In the cold
and stony water my white shirt shivers.
It is the most primary phonological opposition consonantal/vocalic which I have used for this poem (and for the whole series of such double quatrains in 'The river'), here with the distribution of the oppositions along the following scheme, where the underlying (but not the surface) rhyme is 'ABCB CDCB', that is, according to the first-order permutation, not the second-order:
| A | 1 | +C+V |
| B | 2, 4, 8 | +C+V, -C+V, -C-V |
| C | 3, 5, 7 | +C-V, -C+V, -C-V |
| D | 6 | +C-V |
1. Hang-on
2. Black night
3. White dry shirt
4. River, fish
5. Blue stone building
6. Breath / meaning
7. Tent / writer
8. Half-moon
Here element 1 'hang-on' is the syllable 'LAL' = 'liquids', which also Hitler used for his 'Heil Hitler' sign, the arm reached out in 90 degrees angle (it consists of one vertical and one horizontal wedge attached on top). For Element 6 = +C-V I used the syllable 'ZI' meaning 'breath, meaning, soul, wish, self'. There would be many alternatives to a purely consonantal syllable but this was perhaps optimal for the particular form which emerged from the rest of the 8 elements. If the number of elements with only vowels or mainly a glottal articulation is very small and therefore constraining for the poem, the number of +C-V elements will be comparatively large and provide for the variation among the poems. For element 8, I wrote down three alternatives - 'entrance hall', 'half-moon' and 'rusk' - and chose the half-moon not only for the relation to the 'hang-on' but also for the context which would make a sort of 'entrance hall' or even 'in trance hold' out of the half-moon. To take element 4 as another example, I used the three concepts 1) 'mnlr' = 'black night', 2) 'vocalic' = 'dream/sleep', and 3) [h] = 'fish', for which the Sumerian ideogram seems to have the value 'KU6' but the Hittite pronounciation of it is listed as 'ha'. There are very few alternatives for the -C-V, for which reason I allowed for this variant, in particular since it is listed also under Sumerian ideogram 'HA' in the overview list at the end of the book. (Also, in a normal Sumerian dictionary such as Hübner and Reizammer, the form 'ha' means 'fish' and not much more). The purely vocalic alternative is basicalled the 'A' = 'water', which goes well together with the fish. There are very few singular vocalic forms - 'E' = 'house' and 'U' = 'grass' and 'I' = 'fat, oil, flesh' are among the very few - about all there is. The 'house' gives the 'mausoleum' in this poem when combined with 'blue' and 'stone'. This means that there is an extremely strong constraining of the poem - there would perhaps be a few alternatives, but they are very very few. What is left of choice is largely conditioned by very general poetic considerations, which means that there is almost nothing left for a 'leo-told zombie' poet role entusiastically spelling out what had been preprogrammed from the nazis. It's not there.
From this, I tried to arrive at a surface maximally close to these constraints while yet maximally acceptable poetically. The task for the writer on such conditions is to narrow the gap between these extremes as much as possible. I considered a poem about a sleeping flatfish on the bottom of the river (which also would have been possible on basis of this very small vocabulary list), but chose the white shirt instead. If an interesting poem results, that tells something about language and cognition. And, of course, poetry and even 'poetic truth'.
In fact, the extremely strong rooting of the poem in the very small vocabulary from Rawlinson - which here means that the 'phonology' is only a matter of internal structure in his lexicon and cannot be taken to refer to real phonological values - means that the semantic content of the poem will be about precisely those artificial myths which was created by the nazis and dumped on Celan and Sachs - who struggled with liberating from them also in these poems.
Compared with Sachs' poem, it is the recursive aspects of the form and the particular semantic concepts derived from the form of natural language which gives rise to the idea of the shirt as a body-space in my poem. It is the same idea as in Sachs' poem - while I have shown that these ideas come from the general properties of language and cognition and not from secret plans for future terrorist projects (however much administration may attempt to prove that in the future). The reason why it has a role to play in these poems is that it also is rooted in the artificial nazi mythology which was Sachs' problem in her life.
The poem which is the corresponding one in Celan's book is about both the theme and elements in Sachs' and my poems and about the cognitive distibution principle which is the link from Sachs' poem to his own via mine:
Landschaft, nicht ohne Falken
Die windigen Isoglossen, semiotisch
entfärbt und verfärbt;
Syntagmen, Syntagmen;
ein Wander-Code, auf Fixstern-Aschen;
eine Wegweiserkette, wundenbeflügelt;
Zeichenwein, in
schmerzbeschrifteten Kufen;
bei
Marstide, Milchblitz
This poem is on exactly the place in Celan's book which corresponds to Sachs' poem in hers. And it is about those general properties of language and cognition which I have used for arriving at the surface poem which shares important properties with Sachs'. The complex and intertwined permutations from level 1 to level 2 in the form I invented, and which gives the basis for my poem, constitute a sort of meandric walk, a stretching of isoglosses across the spectrum, "ein Wander-Code, eine Wegweiserkette" which also provide for a semiotic basis for understanding the relation between a city-space and a cognitive map - which means a sort of 'ideogrammatic semantic fields' of high generality. Those are spelt out of the 'syntagms' composed of these concepts. Even the phonology, with features and 'liquids', is in the last line. That is a poetic fact, not a case of secret agency.
The proof that this means that Sachs is my mother and Celan is my father is found in the revelation in the tree in Vilnius - or rather in the PHOTO which I made of it. It turns out that Celan's poem is a poetic description line by line, almost pixel by pixel, of this photo:
See the 'Kufen' = 'runners' (as under the pram in 1961) which point to the apparent metal rod beating the skull with the apparently 'broken nose' in the righthand side of the photo. There is an incredible detail in the mapping. See also the two M's - the big one in 'Syntag-M-en' and the small one 90 degrees in the lower lefthand corner - which tell that it be about the PHOTO.
This photo and the 3 poems - including the basic permutation which also is the essence of the informal proof - seem to constitute a proof that Sachs and Celan are my genetic parents and none of them were secret political agents. They were poets investigating the poetic aspects of language and cognition for the poetic truth behind the tragic nazi mythologies - which means rather the opposite of those who try to establish a mythology on basis of the form of language and cognition. Their concern with the form of administrative power in language is about the struggle between administrative power and poetic truth.
See also Nelly Sachs' poetic version of the photo - as a 'root sign'.
The self-referring recursive property makes for the washing and death theme in Sachs's poem and for the formal self-reference which explains the parallel to Sachs's poem in Celan's. My poem is about that link between the two poems - which means the link which holds the two parallel texts together.
Now this composition of Celan's book, being about the struggle between the power of administration and the truth of poetry, starting with the power of administration in the first 15 poems and turning towards the truth of poetry in the rest, can be seen as the background for his death in the Seine river in 1970 - followed by the flood in Rumania and the quake in Peru. It seems to have been the 1968 coups by administrative power - with the apparent plans for administrative hijacking of poetry - that led to his death.
It is the RIVER. A river is a representation of the 'keys'. The water flows downwards in the lines but it also swirls in the rows and curves in the landscape, just like my first- and second-order permutations with a recursive property.
The poem of mine which provides for a proof of the status of the poetry of Sachs and Celan is part of a project I made in the autumn 1995 and spring 1996 on these distributional principles of the keys. The poem on 'washing the shirt' was completed on 12 April 1996. I used the star structure for this particular cycle which I constructed mainly (as it seems to be the case from my notes) by way of a rather limited set of basic concepts (probably those with much mythological weight) to the basic cuneiform signs - which I at that time believed represented a relevant interpretation of cuneiform. Could be it does, could be there is more to be said about that decipherment. I have later launched scepticism about the received interpretation - and it could be that my studies of the poetic structure is a part of the background for this criticism - if one assumes that the decipherment is based on poetic intuitions when it comes to closing the gap which the alphabet created. If so, that could be the reason 1) why the received cuneiform is wrong, and 2) why it nevertheless is right. One sees it right if one 'closes the gap' between these extremes. The fact that my poem constitutes a relevant bridge between the poems of Sachs and Celan is an argument in favor of the relevance of this decipherment, while the fact that this is a very general interpretation is an argument in favor of the assumption that this could be about a general cognitive code and not a specific natural language spoken once upon a time. The extensive borrowing of basic semantic concepts among the various 'cuneiform languages' tells about this situation: On the one hand, there should not be too many such languages if the code is a universal cognitive code, and on the other hand, if there are different languages, the borrowing of universal concepts among them has its explanation in such a function. Since it is the most basic phonological articulation I have tried to implement in my poem, it can be that I have come across something of relevance even if the historic and science-theoretic basis for the decipherment of cuneiform is weak.
However that be, the current received interpretation (which goes back to the formation of the Sunnmørian Empire in the 19th century) probably has relevance for some things, in some way or other - as this poem also may suggest, however much one must contribute in terms of poetic interpretation. I used the basic syllables and concepts derived from them and classified them according to the phonological opposition CONSONANTAL vs. VOCALIC which I used for setting up the grids (according to the 'star' structure) of underlying semantic elements. One starts out with rather rigid forms in the grid and allows for as much reformation as is needed to get a meaningful result. If too much twisting is allowed in order to reach a 'poetic'- sounding form, one loses the grip on the underlying form, and if too little, it tends to look too strange. One tries to jerk it into a suitable form as well as one can - but it goes without saying that there is not much left of the arbitrarity of poetic observation within these frameworks. It is a study of that form in language and cognition which gives rise to mythology (e.g., the mythological story of Jacob and Esau and the lenses and the sheep and all that seems to be composed from the concepts emerging from phonological paradigms over the variation of one the three elements in a set of three-consonant roots in Hebrew, not unsimilar in formation as compared with the matrix of featural oppositions I have used for my 'stars' here), and hence a rather archaic and 'administrative' activity compared with the freedom of poetic observation for the new technology.
When writing this cycle, I ran through all the relevant combinatorial possibilities, which made for 12 'stars' = double quatrains, or 24 quatrains altogether. Later (it may even have been in Vilnius after 2000 when I worked with a project on the 'TURN of ELEVEN' and the RIVER = Norwegian 'elven'), I arranged them into an order which allowed for them to be conceived of as a single poem - with the theme THE RIVER. It is only after I have written the study on Celan's "Späte Gedichtsammlung" that I can see that the poem can be taken to be about Celan's death in the river Seine. In fact my concern was also about the relation between the river Neris in Vilnius and the river Seine in Paris. (This was partly due to 'Teresa Cheung' whom I met in early 1991 in Budapest shortly after my [step]father's death in late 1990).
The series consists of double quatrains. I notice that the poem which is about the link between the poems of Sachs (#5 in her book) and Celan (#5 in the 'poetic observation' part in his book) starts at quatrain #5. A sort of 5-5-5, telling that the poets are not propagandists for political terrorism.
The theme can be seen to be the role of the phonology of the consonantal/vocalic opposition in the death of Paul Celan suiciding in the Seine, probably at Pont Mirabeau on 20 April (that at least is when he disappeared), and found at Courbevoie (= 'Grover') in Neuilly sur-Seines (= 'Nelly Sachs'!) on 1 May (= worker's day). It was allegedly a fisherman who found him in the water (according to Felstiner's biography). It is about an attempt to spot a principled linguistic or cognitive rationale in the form of the 'keys' between two technologies which are characterized by administrative power (the alphabet) and poetic truth (the computer). The story is here about the reactionary 1968 assault of administrative power on poetic truth - which is wrong way: That is backwards to the second millenium.
A study of the poems from #16 onwards in Celan's book can reveal that there are many themes shared with the ones I found when permuting and distributing the binary and most elementary opposition of consonantal vs. vocalic over the grids, even if the order need not be exactly the one I have put them in after 2000. ('Geheimnisumflockt' = quatrains 7-8, 'Auf den Geisterschwellen' = quatrains 11-12, etc). These are about the primary linguistic articulations. The recognition of the 'river' in these poems after #16 could tell about Celan's suicide that it was about plunging himself into the poetic truth rather than into the barren power of administration.
He is assumed to have gone in the Seine at Pont Mirabeau and was found at Courbevoie - which means a 'J'-shaped tour, a mirrored 'J'. 'Seeing a curve'. My poem 'The River' describes something of a similar 'J', only reversed, like a reversed dive. The 'J' is inbetween the consonantal and the vocalic, or both.
Poem #26 in Celan's book, which is #11 ('eleven') after the beginning of the 'poetic truth' section starting on #16, seems to be about precisely this 'star' structure which I have used here. His poem goes as follows:
Leb die Leben, leb sie alle,
halt die Träume auseinander,
sieh, ich steige, sieh, ich falle,
bin ein andrer, bin kein andrer.
Adding this to #5 in parallel with Sachs, as well as the rest of the book, one gets a rather interesting picture of the mechanics in the mapping among parallel texts for describing the form of language and cognition for the poetic observation and poetic truth which the new era is about. That certainly seems to be about 'getting the keys out of the safe'.
It was while I waited in the bus at Chatelet for it to start to cross the Seine that a rainbow appeared on the sky and a strange poetic clarity. Cp. Sachs #11. Reading this poem (in spite of its character of 'meccano' poetry) tends to put me in a state of heightened awareness of colours.
The river
Many think the eagles say
that they sail on fire when
they stretch out their wings for prey:
Fire leans on fire then.
Eagles sail on winds of smoke.
Hear their thundervoice: Your neck is bare.
The flames which lick your neck and yoke
have their burning winds from eagles near.
Hangs an eagle over flocks of underbirds
beats the Holy Spirit on its wings.
Flocks of doves under the thunderbirds
write the pillared script of kings.
A baptist hears the Holy Spirit thundering above
when he with naked neck lights a bonfire.
John the Baptist saw a single dove
under flocks eagles flying higher.
In the autumn dark, my days grow shorter.
In the white river, I wash at night.
My shirt breathes in the silent water,
in its blue and stone mausoleum of light.
The shirt is the tent of my soul.
A single half-moon writes in the river
as I wash the meanings out. In the cold
and stony water, my white shirt shivers.
The autumn silences the river's voices
from fish and birds under the half-moon sky.
The river's annual darkness poises
the waning and the waxing, and these eagles high.
The wading birds in the dark half-year
hide their signs in the black winds,
and the moon speaks darkly in the autumn air
of hidings birds, and silvery fins.
My house of wood and stone will grow
like rock into the stairs of water, like trees
into the stones. This bank is low.
I dream I'm swimming in the sea.
Like a stone, I sink into my bed. Its cup
embeds these swaying reeds. My sleep is good.
The sleep my body's drinking up
drinks the stairs of stones and wood.
My hands washes the entrance racks.
I wet the rails of rotten logs,
and run the duster where the river tracks
its blackest water, by the darkest bogs.
I wash and make the entrance racks so wet
that a fish on fire on the river's bank
looks darker than the flatfish which I pet
at night when washing on the threshold plank.
As Jesus took his washing share
and washed their feet in the last meal's hold,
and waves washed out his writing where
the fish turned in the water's cold,
so Pilate by his desk sat down to write:
"This crackling fire is the sea inland.
It looks like lead in the descending light.
It floods my desk. I wash my hands".
On a haystack, I climbed high at night.
The flat top of the stack was wet with dew
as kitchen tables, or as sinks, or even ovens might
be when a fish is sacrificed for me and you.
Stars in my hand burned it all.
In the oven, where the oily bread is made,
I wet the fish, and saw the fire fall
like holy water falling from the spade.
The fish for the meal at night says: "When the table
is set, when the oil is served,
the dark spice rests in your hands, able
to pierce itself with its arrow herb.
I write in water: Please hand me a glass.
Open this oven, and hand me the good
touch of spice, set fire to the grass,
then consecrate the water, and I will write your food".
In the rainstorm, in the darkness, a lightning flashes
over the river as I write at night.
The lightning in the palm of the sky lashes
the desk where my hand swims in the light.
The bright fish which I hold in my hand
is a child's rusk in the little mouth:
My desk of poetry makes this land
a script of flashing lights from the south.
This earth gives all our names call for:
They sound from the procrustean smith
whose beds are large, who made the door
St.Peter knocks on in the Christian myth.
These beds are from the forge of thunder
and fire light: Their frogs of faith are green.
They table all called for the fire under,
and all the doormen call on Halloween.
Here, thunder meets the frogs which leap
ashore to rest on the grassy brim.
The human enterprise opening asleep
is a pot of earth, or a place to swim.
The water and the fire turn to earth.
This is a man's bed when he finds a place
to ask for rest, or to seek his birth
in this grass on fire, by the frogs of grace.
© John Bjarne Grover
On the web 19 September 2004
Last updated on 5 December 2007