‘The Stone in the Air’: Paul Celan's other Terrain

Abstract

Literary writing has operated as a space of inquiry unsettling the literal and figurative ground on which thinking takes place. From Hölderlin's invocations to the ether, to Walter Benjamin's characterization of Baudelaire's poetry as unfathomable, a certain tradition of writing, particularly in German letters, takes shape around a critique of gravity. Against the background of a geopoetics, I propose to turn to the question of an inconstant and inconsistent ground in Paul Celan's ‘geological lyric’ by explicating the relationship in his writing between the earth and its unthought other: air. This reading has as its object of inquiry what I am calling Celan's aerography, which is doubly articulated in the turn to aerial space in his poetry and in his articulation of the work of air in those terrestrial landscapes formed and deformed by aeolian processes. I argue that the radically dissipative geographies evoked in his poems could extend critical geographic inquiry into a multiple and turbulent materiality; however, the sheer spectrality of the material world in Celan's poetry seems to require an (a)material criticism, that is, a materiality without matter.

Geographies of media and communication I

“…Spaces and places proliferate because of all of the differences in how communicational encounters can occur. From casual encounters between friends on social media which are slyly turned into marketable data (Wilson, 2015b: 347), to passionate and empowering encounters between authors and audiences (Madge, 2014), to disconcerting encounters between humans and non-humans (Dixon and Jones, 2014; Gallacher, 2011; Lorimer, 2010), to paradoxical encounters between symbols and matter (Groves, 2011; Vasudevan, 2007), to frustrating encounters between authors and editors (Katz, 2013), to vicariously-lived encounters between raced and gendered actors and the world (Anderson, 2013; Glynn and Cupples, 2015), the essence of mediated communication is the encounter – an infinitely malleable event. By focusing explicitly on the metaphysics of encounter, geographers with an interest in media and communication will be able to create new opportunities for analysis, empathy, and intervention.…”

“…Research now moves beyond familiar questions of semiosis and mimesis to explore material, embodied, and emotional dimensions of what Tomaney calls the ‘art of belonging’ (2010: 312). This move is partly a matter of asking how literature is appropriated, with attention to the variety of audiences and readings, and it is also partly about the ‘multiplication and turbulence of matter’ (Groves, 2011: 474). It now seems that it may be helpful to credit word assemblages with material qualities: ‘porous, spongy: [a good poem] knows of the erosions, to which it exposes itself’ (Celan quoted in Groves, 2011: 469).…”

“…This move is partly a matter of asking how literature is appropriated, with attention to the variety of audiences and readings, and it is also partly about the ‘multiplication and turbulence of matter’ (Groves, 2011: 474). It now seems that it may be helpful to credit word assemblages with material qualities: ‘porous, spongy: [a good poem] knows of the erosions, to which it exposes itself’ (Celan quoted in Groves, 2011: 469). This material sensibility in turn suggests that when studying a poem the geographer’s purpose may no longer be ‘to cover the familiar ground of “sense-of-place”’ but rather ‘to explore how the poem is a kind of place and the way in which poems create space and place through their very presence on the page’ (Cresswell, 2015: 3).…”

On the creative (re)turn to geography: poetry, politics and passion

“…A particularly compelling and nuanced topoanalytical critique of Pablo Neruda's poem ‘Alturas de Macchu Picchu’ is given by Cocola () in which he makes a reading of the complex matrix of places involved in this particular poem's ‘story’. Other works have focused on the poets themselves, such as Groves' () exploration of how Paul Celan unsettles the literal and figurative ground through his poem ‘geological lyric’ and Tomaney's () discussion of ‘place attachments’ and the artistic expression of the ‘local’ through a reading of the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh and his notion of the ‘parochial imagination’.…”

Toward a poetics of air: sequencing and surfacing breath

“…A special issue on ‘aerographies’ exemplifies this. The issue (edited by Mark Jackson and Maria Fannin) included submissions addressing the phenomenology of fog (Martin ) and atmospheres of contagion (Mitchell ) in addition to the poetry of Paul Celan (Groves ) and James Turrell's ‘Skyrooms’ (Saito ). Furthermore the editors cite the work of artists Robert Barry, Yves Klein and HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen) (Jackson and Fannin ).…”