Wolfgang Rihm
Lichtzwang | Atemwende: 1 | Paul Celan: A Stranger to Life
Setting Words to Music
WOLFGANG RIHM ON ‘LICHTZWANG’
Poetic Text and Musical Context
From ‘Texte poétique et contexte musical’ in Wolfgang Rihm, Fixer la liberté ? Écrits sur la musique (Geneva: Éditions Contrechamps, 2014). Translated here by Richard Jonathan.
The ‘epic’ character of a piece of music does not necessarily consist in the representation of an action that one could communicate verbally but rather in the transposition of certain principles of the unfolding of verbal action towards techniques of musical development.
Zong-De An, Le Temps, 2018
In Lichtzwang for solo violin and orchestra, the second part of an attempt at a portrait of Paul Celan conceived as a cycle, I deliberately bring out this epic element. I take as my point of departure the kernel of a single word, Lichtzwang (‘light compulsion’), the title of a poetry collection by Celan and the central poetic notion of one of the poems. It concerns someone who cannot ‘darken over towards’ someone else when, or because, there reigns a ‘light compulsion’. This occurs against the background of an imaginary eulogy for the dead that I, struck by the suicide of the poet, dared to term ‘in memoriam’.
Zong-De An, Le Temps, 2019
This was all the more an attempt to work in the epic register in that I tried, via the writing, to integrate the tone of a lament (the musical topos) in the situation of a ‘being under light compulsion’ (the verbal image). Moreover, I tried to do so—having considered this incapacity to ‘darken over towards someone’—by imagining all that, in true obscurity, still opposes one who accepts ‘light compulsion’ and who, though suffering from it, nevertheless speaks from that state.
Zong-De An, Le Temps, 2019
That is why the role is given to a solo violin that a collectivity (I did not use the violins of the orchestra) first opposes and almost impedes, but then participates in its breakdown via a commentary in the form of a eulogy for the dead. From the point of view of the musical discourse, the growing solitude of the poetic voice—its decomposition, after an ‘arrival of light’, into isolated and increasingly incommensurable sentences, words and syllables—is concretely perceptible at the end of the work.
Zong-De An, Le Temps, 2019
The obsessional character of both the eulogy for the dead and the violin/solo voice will have overcome that which surrounds it thanks to song. It then falls into the dissolution, indicated by unisons on C, of all sonorous individuality. These two processes—subjective eulogy for the dead and increasing solitude—occur simultaneously, one within the other; their identities as ‘poetic text’ and ‘musical context’ disappear in an amalgam in the epic register. The idea of ‘disappearance of one in the other’ is also expressed by the mixing of two genres, the concert and the cantata.
Zong-De An, Le Temps, 2008
In Lichtzwang, text and music enter into a symbiotic relationship wherein music is indeed the external manifestation but it is the text that determines the internal life. This is probably one more proof of the impossibility of marrying music and text unless the two intertwine like arabesques around each other, forming a décor for one another, and the vibrations of their relationship become what we experience.
Julio le Parc, Continuel mobile, 1963
Note that, respecting the demands of plurivocity and univocity, vibrations always travel a two-way street: in one direction as sound, toward the exterior, and in the other direction as content, toward the interior. The boundaries fluctuate, yet we experience the transitions as ruptures because we lack the organ that can simultaneously apprehend an abstract conception as sensory experience and sensory experience as an abstract conception. And that is just fine. It means that it is we who remain in movement, it is we who—once music speaks to us or words move us—have to substitute for this impossible simultaneity a feeling of a distance travelled. In a word, it is we who, in linking the two, bring to life something new.
Chryssa, Cycladic Books, 1962
Paul Celan | Tr. R. Heinemann & B. Krajewski
WOLFGANG RIHM IN ‘MARA, MARIETTA’
Richard Jonathan
IN DEN FLÜSSEN NÖRDLICH DER ZUKUNFT
Wolfgang Rihm, 4 Gedichte aus Atemwender: 1
In den Flüssen nördlich der Zukunft
werf ich das Netz aus, das du
zögerd beschwerst
mit von Steinen geschriebenen
Schatten.
In the rivers north of the future
I cast out the net, which you
hesitantly weight
with stone-written
shadows.
FROM ‘MARA, MARIETTA’
Part Ten Chapter 13
Tossing off three arpeggios, the pianist tosses me into expectation: I am a fisherman, casting out the net which you have weighted with stones. Hesitating, you wondered whether one more stone would be one too many, one less one too few: You have found the right tension, for in the clear water my net is suspended (the shadows of the stones tell me so). There is nothing to do now but wait. Listen: The music makes no claim to grasp meaning, the voice pursues its own phantoms. Before it’s over, Marietta, tell me: Why are you leaving me? Haven’t we been good at managing the distance that makes intimacy possible? Haven’t we found the right tension, the tension that allows us—time and time again—to sparkle in our self-becoming? Oh set your stones again, my love, the river has not yet reached the sea; let me cast the net again, beyond what you and I can see: Do you no longer have faith in me?
Neysa Grassi, Warm Spring Rain, 2017
MARA, MARIETTA: A LOVE STORY IN 77 BEDROOMS – READ THE FIRST CHAPTER
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Wolgang Rihm
LICHTZWANG
Paul Celan
A Stranger to Life
PAUL CELAN
George Steiner
From George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan (New York: New Directions, 2011) pp. 206-212
To no man do the Sophoclean epithets ‘unhoused,’ ‘homeless,’ ‘banned from the hearth’ apply more pitilessly than they do to Paul Celan. He was a stranger to life. His translations are feats of genius; they repay a lifetime’s study. But in each of half a dozen languages he was a virtuoso vagrant, not an inhabitant. Celan’s contributions to German poetry and prose rank with Hölderlin’s. They are innovative beyond Rilke. But in that tongue his parents and millions of fellow Jews had been butchered. Its scandalous survival after the Shoah, the knowledge that he was adding to its prestige and future filled Celan with guilt, at times with loathing (he earned his precarious living by teaching German). A barely tolerated, intermittent guest of himself, Celan underwent, may have sought refuge in severe bouts of mental derangement, of Umnachtung, again comparable to Hölderlin’s. Almost everyone whom he had trusted, whom he had granted some nuance of intimacy came to be rejected, to be bitterly condemned for failing to share wholly Celan’s anguish, his despairing reading of the hunted condition of the Jew. Or for failing to embrace with sufficient public vehemence Celan’s struggle against ludicrous charges of plagiarism (the ‘Goll affair’).
Anne Eva Bergman, L’or de vivre – Feu, 1965
Remarkable women, Ingeborg Bachmann1 for one, passed in and out of his torment. The late love lyrics composed on a visit to Jerusalem are a glory. But even love was in a sense contraband, a transient unearned grace smuggled across the ashen barriers of pain. It is a somewhat facile truth, but a truth nonetheless, that suicide was inscribed in Celan’s early poems, in the ‘Todesfuge’ whose fame nauseated him, whose reception into the German school curriculum was a final irony. From the outset Paul Celan was on leave from death.
1 – For more on the relationship between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, see HANS WERNER HENZE.
Anna-Eva Bergman, N° 26-1962 Feu, 1962
I have within obvious limits of understanding spent many years with the writings of Martin Heidegger and Paul Celan. I have stood by their graves and visited some of the landscapes instrumental to their perceptions. These extend from the Black Forest to the island of Delos, from the Rue d’Ulm in Paris to the Almond Tree Gate in Jerusalem. Despite the already extant and multiple secondary literature, so much of it self-serving and ill-informed, I had planned to conclude this essay with something worth saying about the Heidegger-Celan encounters and non-encounters. I had hoped to show how manifestly these crystallize and bring to their summit the history, the essence of the relations between poetry and philosophy, between thought and its poetics as these first quicken the Pre-Socratics and Plato into undying life.
Anna-Eva Bergman, N° 63-1961 Grand univers aux petits carrés, 1961
I have noted that the mounting documentation of Heidegger’s proto-Nazism and postwar evasions renders access unnerving. The exclusion zone around Celan is even more forbidding. Facts dissolve into gossip. Amateur suppositions as to Celan’s mental state are an indecency. As Derrida says in his Schibboleth pour Paul Celan, ‘there is secrecy here, withdrawal, forever removed from exhaustive hermeneutic.’ To touch on the themes—I speak for myself—is to be made acutely aware of the limits of one’s own intellectual resources and penetrative sensibility.
Anna-Eva Bergman, N° XB-1956 Icare, 1956
Most probably Celan first came across Heidegger’s work when he met Bachmann, who had written her thesis on Sein und Zeit. The archives in Marbach reveal the closeness, the concentration of Celan’s readings. He annotates, underlines, glosses passage after passage in Heidegger’s major publications. This material is yet to be evaluated in detail. It puts beyond doubt the depth of Heidegger’s linguistic, rather than philosophical impact on the poet (Lucretius imitating and recasting Epicurus). Heidegger’s neologisms, his welding of words into hybrid composites, his parataxic abruptness—the omission of inert, qualifying connectives—become functional in Celan’s hermetic diction. The merest hint of sympathy with the Nazi past, the most hidden trace of forgiveness or of indifference to the Holocaust maddened Celan.
Anna-Eva Bergman, N° 18-1956 Grand soleil, 1956
Heidegger’s implications in Hitlerism were known to Celan. Nevertheless he familiarized himself with, he sought out ‘the bearer of death, that master from Germany.’ My conjecture is that Heidegger’s pressure on the limits of language, his innovations within the crucible of violently forged syntax provided Celan with a vital stimulus and ‘complementarity’ (in quantum theory contrary truths may both be true). For his part Heidegger grew attentive to some of Celan’s later poems and enigmatic persona. According to his son, a suspect witness, Heidegger was unaware that Celan was a Jew. This is implausible but just conceivable. He attended one of Celan’s last public readings. The resulting photograph is mesmeric; wearing his customary black headpiece, it is Heidegger who looks like an aged rabbi. He confided to a colleague that Celan was gravely, fatally ill. The suicide certified his diagnosis. Did he ever return to Celan’s poems as he did incessantly to Hölderlin’s? Did he take note of the tragic affinities between the fortunes of the two? Documents, which may be relevant, are still unpublished. All we have is the poem. And the jabber of often baseless attempts at decoding.
Anna-Eva Bergman, N° 5-1952 Deux formes noires, 1952
Although his delivery was monochrome and although he felt that his poems elicited either incomprehension or derision (many were of unprecedented difficulty), Celan gave a reading at the University of Freiburg on July 24, 1967. The next day he went to visit Heidegger in his famous hut at Todtnauberg. Had the master invited him? Had Celan requested the meeting? If so, why? What did he think might come of it? Crucial questions to which we have no answer. The poem is dated August 1st. It tells of the well in front of the hut and of the star carved on its stone lintel. For Celan stars had gone yellow in remembrance of the horrors inflicted on those condemned to wear them. There is a guest book: ‘whose name did the book / register before mine?’ Todtnauberg had long been the object of reverent pilgrimage. Celan added his own autograph. Michael Hamburger translates:
the line inscribed
in that book about
a hope, today,
of a thinking man’s
coming
word
in the heart…
Anna-Eva Bergman, GB 25-1967 Éclipse, 1967
‘Man’s’ is Hamburger’s misleading addendum. The German is tighter and faithful to Heidegger’s usage:
auf eines Denkenden
kommendes
Wort
im Herzen…
The ‘word’ itself, metrically and typographically isolated, is ‘thought in advent,’ beyond any individual speaker. It speaks the speaker. A third party, ‘he who drives us,’ listens in. The walk—like Nietzsche, Heidegger was a prodigious walker—follows ‘trodden wretched / tracks through the high moors.’ Here translation goes limp. In Celan’s Knüppel-pfade resound the sadistic blows of cudgels. Moor as in Hochmoor echoes the bitter, funereal chant sung by concentration camp inmates on their flogged outing to the peat bogs. The poem ends on a lifeless notation: ‘dampness, much.’
Anna-Eva Bergman, GB 55-1974 Petites vagues, 1974
The interpretation of ‘Todtnauberg’ as a memore of abysmal disappointment, of noncommunication invaded by presences from the Shoah, is self-evident. It corresponds with the failure of the guest to obtain from his host the hoped-for word, the utterance from and to the heart. But what did Celan expect? What could, what would Heidegger have said in extenuation, in remorse for his own role and omissions in the time of the inhuman? What license did Celan have for his provocation (‘calling out’)?
Anna-Eva Bergman, L6-1963 Horizon, 1963
Was anything said during that long walk on the sodden uplands? One school of commentary has it that both men shared that silence of which they were craftsmen. We simply do not know; we never shall. Moreover, shortly after the poem first appears, Celan informs his friend Franz Wurm in Zürich and his wife Gisèle that his day with Heidegger had proved positive and satisfying. There is no reason to suppose that this was a macabre pleasantry. But what might Celan’s mental state have been when he volunteered this report? Again, we have no way of knowing. What remains is an image, perhaps a fathomless myth in Plato’s sense. Sovereign philosophical thought, sovereign poetry side by side in an infinitely signifying but also inexplicable silence. A silence both safeguarding and trying to transcend the limits of speech which are, as in the very name of that hut, also those of death.
Anna-Eva Bergman, N° 4-1957 La Grande Montagne, 1957
Paul Celan
LICHTZWANG: 22 POEMS
Translated by Michael Hamburger
From Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger (NY: Persea Books, 1995) pp. 294-323
HÖRRESTE, SEHRESTE, im
Schlafsaal eintausendundeins,
tagnächtlich
die Bären-Polka:
sie schulen dich um,
du wirst wieder er.
SCRAPS OF HEARD, OF THINGS SEEN, in
Ward a thousand and one,
day-nightly
the Bear Polka:
you’re being re-educated
they’ll turn you back into he.
Hideaki Yamanobe, Scratch, 2012
Hideaki Yamanobe, Untitled, 2018
IHN RITT DIE NACHT, er war zu sich gekommen,
der Waisenkittel war die Fahn,
kein Irrlauf mehr,
es ritt ihn grad —
Es ist, es ist, als stünden im Liguster die Orangen,
als hätt der so Gerittene nichts an
als seine
erste
muttermalige, ge-
heimnisgesprenkelte
Haut.
NIGHT RODE HIM, he had come to his senses,
the orphan’s tunic was his flag,
no more going astray,
it rode him straight —
It is, it is as though oranges hung in the privet,
as though the so-ridden had nothing on
but his
first
birth-marked, se
cret-speckled
skin.
MIT MIKROLITHEN gespickte
schenkend-verschenkte
Hände.
Das Gespräch, das sich spinnt
von Spitze zu Spitze,
angesengt von
sprühender Brandluft.
Ein Zeichen
kämmt es zusammen
zur Antwort auf eine
griibelnde Felskunst.
HANDS
giving – given away,
larded with microliths.
The conversation that’s spun
from peak to peak,
scorched by
spume air from a fire.
A sign
combs it together
in reply to a
brain-racking rock art.
Hideaki Yamanobe, Scratch 2, 2018
Hideaki Yamanobe, Klangassoziationen Ton 38, 2008
WIR LAGEN
schon tief in der Macchia, als du
endlich herankrochst.
Doch konnten wir nicht
hinüberdunkeln zu dir:
es herrschte
Lichtzwang.
WE WERE LYING
deep in the macchia, by the time
you crept up at last.
But we could not
darken over to you:
light compulsion
reigned.
WAS UNS
zusammenwarf, schrickt auseinander,
ein Weltstein, sonnenfern,
summt.
THAT WHICH
threw us together
startles apart,
a world-boulder, sun-remote,
hums.
Hideaki Yamanobe, Summer Night I, 2018
Hideaki Yamanobe, Daylight White 2, 2018
BEI BRANCUSI, ZU ZWEIT
Wenn dieser Steine einer
verlauten ließe,
was ihn verschweigt:
hier, nahebei,
am Humpelstock dieses Alten,
tät es sich auf, als Wunde,
in die du zu tauchen hättst,
einsam,
fern meinem Schrei, dem schon mit-
behauenen, weißen.
AT BRANCUSI’S, THE TWO OF US
If one of these stones
were to give away
what it is that keeps silent about it:
here, nearby,
at this old man’s limping stick,
it would open up, as a wound,
in which you would have to submerge,
lonely,
far from my scream, that is
chiselled already, white.
TODTNAUBERG
Arnika, Augentrost, der
Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem
Sternwürfel drauf,
in der
Hutte,
die in das Buch
– wessen Namen nahms auf
vor dem meinen? –,
die in dies Buch
geschriebene Zeile von
einer Hoffnung, heute,
auf eines Denkenden
kommendes
Wort
im Herzen,
Waldwasen, uneingeebnet,
Orchis und Orchis, einzeln,
Krudes, später, im Fahren,
deutlich,
der uns fährt, der Mensch,
der’s mit anhört,
die halb-
beschrittenen Knüppel-
pfade im Hochmoor,
Feuchtes, viel.
JETZT, da die Betschemel brennen,
eß ich das Buch
mit allen
Insignien.
TODTNAUBERG
Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-crowned die above it,
in the
hut,
the line
– whose name did the book register before mine? –,
the line inscribed
in that book about
a hope, today,
of a thinking man’s
coming
word
in the heart,
woodland sward, unlevelled,
orchid and orchid, single,
coarse stuff, later, clear
in passing,
he who drives us, the man,
who listens in,
the half-
trodden fascine
walks over the high moors,
dampness, much.
Now that the hassocks are burning
I eat the book
with all its
insignia.
Hideaki Yamanobe, Scratch Flowing 3, 2010
JETZT, da die Betschemel brennen,
eß ich das Buch
mit allen
Insignien.
NOW, that the hassocks are burning
I eat the book
with all its
insignia.
Hideaki Yamanobe, Klang, 2002
EINEM BRUDER IN ASIEN
Die selbstverkliirten
Geschütze
fahren gen Himmel,
zehn
Bomber gähnen,
ein Schnellfeuer blüht,
so gewiß wie der Frieden,
eine Handvoll Reis
erstirbt ais dein Freund.
FOR A BROTHER IN ASIA
The self-transfigured
guns
ascend to heaven,
ten
bombers yawn,
a quick-firing flowers,
certain as peace,
a handful of rice
unto death remains your true friend.
Hideaki Yamanobe, Scratch 08-4, 2008
Hideaki Yamanobe, Sunday ‘Memo: 02w-10 Daylight’, 2003
WIE DU dich ausstirbst in mir:
noch im letzten
zerschlissenen
Knoten Atems
steckst du mit einem
Splitter
Leben.
HOW YOU die out in me:
down to the last
worn-out
knot of breath
you’re there, with a
splinter
of life.
HIGHGATE
Es geht ein Engel durch die Stube –:
du, dem unaufgeschlagenen Buch nah,
sprichst mich
wiederum los.
Zweimal findet das Heidekraut Nahrung.
Zweimal erblalßts.
HIGHGATE
An angel has walked through the room –:
you, near the unopened book,
acquit
me once more.
Twice the heather finds nourishment.
Twice it fades.
Hideaki Yamanobe, Klangassoziationen Szene V 6/12, 2014
Hideaki Yamanobe, Landscape 08-01, 2008
ICH KANN DICH NOCH SEHN: ein Echo,
ertastbar mit Fühl-
wörtern, am Abschieds-
grat.
Dein Gesicht scheut leise,
wenn es auf einmal
lampenhaft hell wird
in mir, an der Stelle,
wo man am schmerzlichsten Nie sagt.
I CAN STILL SEE YOU: an echo
that can be groped towards with antenna
words, on the ridge of
parting.
Your face quietly shies
when suddenly
there is lamplike brightness
inside me, just at the point
where most painfully one says, never.
DIE EWIGKEITEN fuhren
ihm ins Gesicht und drüber
hinaus,
langsam löschte ein Brand
alles Gekerzte,
ein Grün, nicht von hier,
umflaumte das Kinn
des Steins, den die Waisen
begruben und wieder
begruben.
THE ETERNITIES struck
at his face and
past it,
slowly a conflagration extinguished
all candled things,
a green, not of this place,
with down covered the chin
of the rock which the orphans
buried and
buried again.
Elvire Ferle, Untitled 9, 1999
Elvire Ferle, Untitled 8, 2015
DIE IRIN, die abschiedsgefleckte,
behest deine Hand,
schneller als
schnell.
Ihrer Blicke Bläue durchwächst sie,
Verlust und Gewinn
in einem:
du,
augenfingrige
Ferne.
THE IRISHWOMAN, mottled with parting,
reads in your hand,
faster than
fast.
The blue of her glances grows through her,
loss and gain
in one:
you,
eye-fingered
farness.
KEIN HALBHOLZ mehr, hier,
in den Gipfelhängen,
kein mit-
sprechender
Thymian.
Grenzschnee und sein
die Pfähle und deren
Wegweiser-Schatten
aushorchender, tot-
sagender
Duft.
NO MORE HALF-WOOD, here,
on the summit slopes,
no col-
loquial
thyme.
Border snow and
its odour that
auscultates the posts
and their road-sign shadows,
declaring them
dead.
Elvire Ferle, Untitled 2, 2015
Elvire Ferle, Untitled 6, 2015
ORANIENSTRASSE 1
Mir wuchs Zinn in die Hand,
ich wulßte mir nicht
zu helfen:
modeln mochte ich nicht,
lesen mocht es mich nicht –
Wenn sich jetzt
Ossietzkys letzte
Trinkschale fände,
liß ich das Zinn
von ihr lernen,
und das Heer der Pilger-
stabe
durchschwiege, durchstünde die Stunde.
ORANIENSTRASSE 1
Tin grew into my hand,
I did not know
what to do:
I had no wish to model,
it had no wish to read me –
If now
Ossietzky’s last
drinking cup were found
I should let the tin
learn from that,
and the host of pilgrim
staves
would stone-wall, withstand the hour.
BRUNNEN-
artig
ins Verwunschne getieft,
mit doppelt gewalmten
Tagträumen drüber,
Quader
ringe
urn jeden Hauch:
die Kammer, wo ich dich liß, hockend,
dich zu behalten,
das Herz befehligt
den uns leise bestrickenden Frost
an den geschiedenen
Fronten,
du wirst keine Blume sein
auf Urnenfeldern
und mich, den Schriftträger, holt
kein Erz aus der runden
Holz-Lehm-Hütte, kein
Engel.
SUBMERGED
Well-
like into accursedness,
with doubly hipped
daydreams above,
ashlar
rings
around each breath:
the bedroom where I left you, crouching
so as to hold you,
the heart commands
the frost that gently captivates us
on the divided
fronts,
you will be no flower
on urn fields
and me, the script-bearer, no
ore releases from the round wood
and mud cabin, no
angel.
Elvire Ferle, Untitled 8, 2015
Elvire Ferle, Untitled 43, 2015
FAHLSTIMMIG, aus
der Tiefe geschunden:
kein Wort, kein Ding,
und beider einziger Name,
fallgerecht in dir,
fluggerecht in dir,
wunder Gewinn
einer Welt.
FALLOW-VOICED, lashed
forth from the depth:
no word, no thing,
and either’s unique name,
primed in you for falling,
primed in you for flying,
sore gain
of a world.
SPERRIGES MORGEN
ich beiße mich in dich, ich schweige mich an dich,
wir tönen,
allein,
pastos
vertropfen die Ewigkeitsklänge,
durchquäkt
von heutigem
Gestern,
wir fahren,
groß
nimmt uns der letzte
Schallbecher auf:
den beschleunigten Herzschritt
draußen
im Raum,
bei ihr, der Erd-
achse.
OBSTRUCTIVE TOMORROW
I bite my way into you, my silence nestles into you,
we sound,
alone,
pastily
eternity’s tones drip away,
croaked through by
the hodiernal
yesterday,
we travel,
largely
the last of the sonic bowls
receives us:
the boosted heart pace
outside
in space,
brought home to the axis
of Earth.
Albert Llobet Portel, Broken Lines II, 2013
John Richard Fox, Untitled 7902, 1979
STREU OCKER in meine Augen:
du lebst nicht
mehr drin,
spar
mit Grab
beigaben, spar,
schreite die Steinreihen ab,
auf den Händen,
mit ihrem Traum
streich über die
ausgemünzte
Schlifenbeinschuppe,
an der
großen
Gabelung er-
zahl dich dem Ocker
dreimal, neunmal.
SPRINKLE OCHRE into my eyes:
no longer
you live in them,
be sparing,
of graveside
supplements, be sparing,
walk up and down the stone rows
on your hands,
with their dream
graze the debased coinage,
the scale of
my temporal bone,
at the
great
road fork tell
yourself to the ochre
three times, nine times.
SCHALTJAHRHUNDERTE, Schalt-
sekunden, Schalt-
geburten, novembernd, Schalt-
tode,
in Wabentrögen gespeichert,
bits
on chips,
das Menoragedicht aus Berlin,
(Unasyliert, un-
archiviert, un-
umfürsorgt?
Am Leben?),
Lesestationen im Spätwort,
Sparflammenpunkte
am Himmel,
Kammlinien unter Beschuß,
Gefühle, frost-
gespindelt,
Kaltstart –
mit Hämoglobin.
LEAP-CENTURIES, leap-
seconds, leap-
births, novembering, leap-
deaths,
stacked in honeycomb troughs,
“bits
on chips”,
the menorah poem from Berlin,
(Unasylumed, un-
archived, un-
welfare-attended? A
-live?),
reading stations in the late word,
saving flame points
in the sky,
comb lines under fire,
feelings, frost-
mandrelled,
cold start –
with haemoglobin.
John Richard Fox, Untitled 7801, 1978
John Richard Fox, Untitled 7601, 1976
WIRK NICHT VORAUS,
sende nicht aus,
steh
herein:
durchgründet vom Nichts,
ledig allen
Gebets,
feinfügig, nach
der Vor-Schrift,
unüberholbar,
nehm ich dich auf,
statt aller
Ruhe.
DO NOT WORK AHEAD,
do not send forth,
stand
into it, enter:
transfounded by nothingness,
unburdened of all
prayer,
microstructured in heeding
the pre-script,
unovertakable,
I make you at home,
instead of all
rest.
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