So much of dad was collected in his name. He spelt it differently when he was young, and changed it sometime in his forties, and as he lay there dead and nameless, the name the mason chiselled into his headstone was spelt incorrectly. The stone is still there, in the cemetery in Kristiansand, with its misspelt name, on top of the interred urn containing the ashes of his body. And when, ten years later, I began to write about him I was prohibited from referring to him by name. Before that I had never given a thought to what a name was and what it meant. But I did so now, accentuated by the events that followed in the wake of the first book, and I began to write this chapter, first about the name itself, then about various names of literature and their function there, starting out with a piece of thinking I found in the writing of Ingeborg Bachmann concerning the decline of the name in literature, contained in a short essay in a book published a few years ago by Pax. The essay on the name began on a right-hand page. On the left-hand page were some lines of a poem my eyes absently scanned when at some point during the spring I sat down with the book in front of me, intending to see if anything of what I had written had been unwittingly drawn from Bachmann’s essay.
So
there are temples yet. A
star
probably still has light.
Nothing,
nothing is lost.
These were the words I read. I guessed they were from a poem of Paul Celan, knowing that Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann had been friends and furthermore enjoyed a certain literary kinship. This is the kind of thing one knows without it necessarily having any bearing on anything, a relationship of some sort that is simply there. That Paul Celan knew and corresponded with Nelly Sachs, for instance, and that Nelly Sachs fled to Stockholm during the war and remained there for the rest of her life. Both were Jewish, and both wrote poetry that had to do with the extermination of the Jews. Both lived in exile, Celan in Paris, Sachs in Stockholm. I had never read any of their poems, apart from Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’, which I found astonishingly beautiful when I was introduced to it as a nineteen-year-old student in the writers’ academy in Hordaland. ‘Svart morgonmjølk me drikk ho um kvelden’, as Hauge’s Norwegian translation went, ‘Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown’, and ‘døden er ein meister frå Tyskland’, ‘death is a master from Germany’. It was a poem I would later feel shame at having found such beauty in, since its theme was not the exquisite and the sublime, but the exquisite and the sublime’s antithesis, the extermination of the Jews.
I skimmed back a few pages in Bachmann’s book. Indeed it was Paul Celan. The six lines cited at the end of the essay were from a poem called ‘Engführung’, or ‘The Straitening’ as it is called in one celebrated English translation. I had not heard of it before, but I did have a collection of Paul Celan’s poetry in Øyvind Berg’s Norwegian translations, it had remained unread on my bookshelf since sometime in the mid-90s and I found it immediately. Something in those six lines had appealed to me. Perhaps it was the sequence ‘Nothing/nothing is lost’ that seemed so positive at first sight, only then to turn itself almost inside out and become the opposite; ‘nothing is lost’ can mean that everything goes on as before, if one reads the words in their most immediate sense, meaning that nothing has been lost, but if they are read in the sense of ‘nothing’ being what is lost, the poem then opens out towards something else entirely, since ‘nothing’ is not simply nothing, it is also the end point of all mysticism – the Kabbalists wrote that God resides in the depths of his nothingness. The idea that God is nothing belongs to negative mysticism; by saying what God is not, the divine may be approached without reduction. I had no idea if Paul Celan’s poem had anything at all to do with such things, but in the preceding lines temples were mentioned, the houses of religion, and a star, which is only there in darkness. ‘A/star/probably still has light’ it said. Why ‘probably’, why ‘still’? The existence of the temples too was qualified by a ‘yet’. Did it have something to do with Rilke’s poem? He too used the word in a sense that seemed to deviate from the expected, when he wrote ‘the houses/that we live in still stand’. All this made the poem potentially very interesting, but the most important reason for me picking it out and skimming through it was because I was looking for something I could use in my essay about the name. I found it.
The place where they lay, it has
a name – it has
none.
I read.
Something had a name, but what this name might be wasn’t mentioned, and then the fact of it having a name was taken back.
With that in mind I noted there wasn’t a single name in the entire poem. Not of a person, not of a place, and not of any time.
Why would that be?
Whatever the reason, I found myself drawn to it, for this was not a world in which the reason for the name not being mentioned could be that it was not important, which is to say not the nameless essence of reality, the world beyond language, true and authentic; this seemed rather to be a world in which the name more simply could not be mentioned. It was as if the very foundation of the name were broken.
What was the foundation of the name?
In what way was it broken?
I read the poem, understanding nothing, it was closed to me, almost completely mute. This was no infrequent experience of mine. I couldn’t read poetry, and had never been able to. At the same time I had always, from when I was nineteen and had been introduced to the leading modernist poets at the writers’ academy, considered poetry to be the pinnacle. What poetry was in touch with was something I was not in touch with, and my respect for poetry was boundless. This is no exaggeration. I have written about it earlier too, in this novel, the way the poem, which I took to be the highest form of expression, refused to open itself to me. When I grew older I became familiar with all the names of the poets and knew enough about them to be able to mention them in what I was writing or talking about, as with the example of Paul Celan above; he was from Romania, his parents died in a German concentration camp, he lived in Paris, wrote in German and committed suicide sometime in the 60s by drowning himself in the Seine. His poems were mysterious, belonging in a way to the same tradition as Hölderlin and Rilke, but at the end of it, because with Celan the language came apart.
I knew who they were, but not what they had written.
Could it really be the case that poets and readers of poetry comprised some esoteric sect? Surely not only the initiated could read poems?
For some reason that was exactly how I had perceived it. The sense of others possessing insights I have no idea about, of everyone else being able and knowledgeable, has pursued me all through my adult life, in almost every respect. And, I think to myself now as I sit here at the age of nearly forty-three, most likely with justification. I suspect there are vast areas of human erotic life about which I know nothing and which I associate with darkness and fervency, an almost limitless sophistication into which other people, though by no means all, are initiated. When I meet people I often think this to myself, that to them I must come across as naïve and innocuous, a bit like a child. The same applies to poetry. Poetry expresses the innermost secrets of life and the world, some people relate to it with the greatest of ease, others are excluded. That I got nothing out of the poetry I read merely confirmed this to be true. It was as if poems were written in code. I felt excluded by many other languages too, that of mathematics, for instance, yet the language of mathematics did not possess the aura for me of leading to the grail, was not shrouded in such dim mists, with half-turned faces, derisive sneers, scornful eyes. This feeling, of being outside what was important, was degrading, since it made me simple and my life shallow. The way I tackled it was to ignore it and pretend not to be bothered. The deep secrets of erotic life and the esoteric insights of poetry were meant for others, whereas I, constrained by the stupid thinness of my life, struggled to accept that life was just that, stupid and thin. At the same time, something happened when I entered my thirties, in that some semblance of confidence came to me in the way I engaged with literature, though it was difficult to pin down, most of all a feeling of being able to see that little bit further, think that little bit further, and that what previously had been closed to me suddenly seemed possible to prise open. Though not unconditionally; I could read The Death of Virgil by Broch with some return, but not The Sleepwalkers by the same author, a novel of which I still hadn’t the faintest understanding. It was at that time I got a job working as a consultant on the Norwegian revision of the Old Testament, and since I had no grounding in the linguistic, cultural or religious aspects that were involved, I had no option but to work hard and meticulously, nothing was going to come to me on a plate, and what revealed itself then, when I went through the first sentence of the creation word for word, for instance, was the way in which entire world views might be encapsulated in a comma, in an ‘and’, in a ‘which’, and, with those insights, how different the world becomes if its description is coordinate with rather than subordinate to the metaphor, for example, or the way a word not only has lexical meaning, but is also coloured by the contexts in which it appears, something the writers of the Bible exploited to the full, for instance by allowing a word at the beginning to apply to the sun’s relation to the earth, and then to let that same word many pages on apply to man’s relation to woman. The word is merely there, in the two different places, and the connection is as good as invisible, yet decisive. People have been reading the Bible as holy Scripture for a couple of thousand years, and every word it contains has been considered meaningful, a dizzyingly tight mesh of different meanings and shades of meaning having thereby arisen, which no single human can ever possibly command. What happened when I started working on those texts was that I learned to read. I began to understand what it meant to read. Reading is seeing the words as lights shining in the dark, one after another, and to engage in the activity of reading is to follow the lights into the text. But what we see is never detached from the person we are; the mind has its limitations, they are personal, but cultural too in that there is always something we cannot see and places we cannot go. If we are patient and investigate the words and their contexts carefully enough, we may nonetheless identify those limitations, and what is revealed to us then is that which lies outside ourselves. The goal of reading is to reach these places. This is what learning is, seeing that which lies outside the confines of the self. To grow older is not to understand more but to realise that there is more to understand. Yet the secrets of the Old Testament were to begin with so remote as to be unthreatening. The secrets of erotic life and poetry were menacing, in contrast, having to do with my identity, and what kept me outside was not the alien nature of their culture but the chasm within my own, which was to do with the very remoteness of such things. I realise this probably comes across as somewhat hysterical, and I don’t know how to put it in order to make it clear just how inhibiting it is to feel excluded from that which is significant. To me this was exactly the aura in which Paul Celan’s poetry was shrouded. His poems cancelled out what was given about the words, and thereby what was given about the world. As such, it was not so much existence that was on the line as identity. The name had to become visible in the nameless, much as the all became visible in the nothing, so I imagined on the basis of the four words, ‘nothing/nothing is lost’, which I had read and puzzled over. And that surely was how it was with regard to the poem as a whole. It was not composed of mysteries, but of words. So all that was required was to read them. To note down all possible meanings of the first word, then the next, and then consider the connections between them. (My Struggle, Book 6)