On opacity (2)
And this further comment by Paul Celan:
Leave the poem its darkness; maybe — maybe! — it will give, when the excessive brightness, which the exact sciences today already know how to put before our eyes, will have changed the very ground of the human genotype, — maybe it will give, on the ground of this ground, shade in which man can reflect on his humanity.
And one more:
The poem speaks of the first and most accidental things as if they were the last ones: The near is at the same time the infinitely distant; if it has the opacity of what stands opposite it, it also has the brightness of the faraway.
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Poasis II: Selected Poems 2000-2024
“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux
but when the “human genotype” changes to android and cyborg, will these latter “reflect on humanity”? or on celan’s “tree-high thought” as it sheds its “shade in which” to reflect?
darkness, brightness; opacity, brightness… where is “the ground of this ground”?