Читать книгу Of Silence and Song - Dan Beachy-Quick - Страница 20

10.

Paul Antschel, Paul Aurel, Paul Ancel, A. Pavel.

So he signed his earliest work before deciding on Paul Celan. In anagram a kind of diaspora. Hope that one permutation will be right and one will arrive in the name that is one’s own.

But mostly a name is a form of exile.

“Todesfuge” ends “dein aschenes Haar Sulamith.”

(Thy ashen hair Shulamith.)

“Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return that we may look upon thee.”

Jewish mystic tradition equates the beloved in the Song of Songs with the Shekinah, the divine presence of God on earth, thought of as a bride. She dwelled in the Temple. Descending as pure grace that lights up the smoke or sits on a cushion.

When the Romans destroyed the Temple the Shekinah stayed on earth. She wanders even now in the dust.

Many prayers call her back home. Prayer that might begin with those words by which the Shekinah is sometimes symbolized: Moon Queen Apple Orchard Bride. Empty vessel with no light of her own but the earthshine of this nearness. Mystics say she is married to Beauty. I don’t know. To sanctify oneself they recommend waking up at midnight and weeping, weeping.

The hope is to return her name to its proper place, but this name wanders the world; nor does it ease the pain of the problem to think that a name can say itself to itself and so become its own place, a kind of portable altar.

A name is not a home.

The mystics say repentance begins by denying oneself the sleep the body needs and the mind desires. Prayer occurs in the absence of oblivion. So it seems. And I didn’t even know that absence and oblivion were different. At night I dream about the bride in my arms even as the bride sleeps dreaming beside me, oblivious of me as I am of her.

I didn’t know I had to make my own absence.

O Shulamith of the dust-covered orchard purple hair, exhume the grave they dug in the air. O Sulamith of the ashen hair, end your wandering through the dust in the clouds, and return.

Paul Celan, A. Pavel, Paul Ancel, Paul Aurel, Paul Antschel. All the light comes in under the crack of a door.

Blank page called a day.

God.