Something shall be later,
that fills itself with you
and lifts itself
to a mouth
Out of shattered
madness
I raise myself
and watch my hand
as it draws the one
single
circle
—Paul Celan (1920-1970)
from Paul Celan: Selections
translated by Pierre Joris
University of California Press (2005)
COMMENTARY
“Imagination, as a structure in the process of a reality that moves toward its truth, belongs both to human consciousness in its bodily location and to the reality that comprehends bodily located man as a partner in the community of being.” Eric Voegelin, In Search of Order, CW Vol 18, p. 52.
Inner form analysis helps us read this poem as a work of participation.
We start with the given: “something shall be later”; this is always true in consciousness because change is universal. Then the specific thesis: this thing that shall be “fills itself with you.” That is, the future thing that is inevitable rises up and constitutes “you.” At this point this “you” is other, though it may refer to one’s self.
The image in the thesis of a filling up of an “other” needs “testing” or qualification for us to experience it. So: “and lifts itself/to a mouth.” The “you” doesn’t lift it, this future thing has energy and purpose, it lifts itself, and not only that, in doing so, it reveals a “mouth.” A source, intake/outgo, of breath, speech, song: life.
With that drama of rebirth, the poem goes back and catches up with itself: “out of shattered / madness”: the future is marked off from the past as from chaos. Then we can see the “raising” in a personal sense, with a first person pronoun. The drama is re-enacted, one might say “imitated.” The qualification of the central image and drama becomes more and more specific, concrete, “imaginable.”
This time what is raised is “my hand” and what it does is inscribe a symbol of perfection, of absoluteness, of purity. The fold in the poem–the re-enactment of the lifting up–creates a mirror in which the I of the self may witness its own participation in the absolute beyond itself: “the one / single/ circle.”