Zawacki, Relation Without Relation Palmer, Celan, Blanchot

"Relation without Relation": Palmer, Celan, BlanchotAuthor(s): Andrew ZawackiSource: New German Critique, No. 91, Special Issue on Paul Celan (Winter, 2004), pp. 117-128Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3211125 .

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"Relation without Relation ". Palmer Celan, Blanchot

Andrew Zawacki

Relation without relation: the phrase emanates from Maurice Blan- chot, yet it characterizes an itinerary crucial to Paul Celan's poetics and to the work by Celan's foremost contemporary American inheritor, Michael Palmer. The author of eight individual poetry volumes, several chapbooks, and The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1999), Palmer has provisionally, if uncomfortably, been associated with so- called Language writing, which took its avant-garde bearings from French post-structuralism, Russian futurism, contemporary abstract art and concrete poetry, fueled by a desire to dismantle the boundaries between literary genres. Comprising writers as diverse as Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, and Susan Howe, the Language school plied an ideology opposed to capitalism, the Vietnam War, the institutionalization of poetry, and a mainstream US verse cul- ture, represented by journals such as The New Yorker and Poetry, that dominated the critical reception of contemporary poetry during the 1960s and 70s. Geographically located primarily in and around San Francisco, Language writers disseminated their work via small-press magazines, most notably L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, and sought to devise a "poetics" that might exasperate, infiltrate, and open up "poetry" to broader provinces and prerogatives, especially literary theory. While committed to interro- gating codes and the limits of signification since the appearance of his earliest collections, Blake s Newton (1972) and The Circular Gates (1974), Palmer possesses an equal tendency toward the lyric and lyrical

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118 Palmer, Celan, Blanchot

prose. His Notes for Echo Lake (1981), First Figure (1984), and At Pas- sages (1995) marry a hermeneutics of linguistic and political suspicion to a penchant for beauty, austere elegance, near-nonsense rhyme, and private textures verging on the hermetic. Like Celan, Palmer draws from a wide range of philosophical, literary, scientific, and aesthetic fields, from the classical thought of Plato and Augustine to the Modern- ist and postmodern endeavors of Raymond Roussel, Gertrude Stein, Adorno, and Wittgenstein. A friend and devotee of the late Robert Dun- can, he has collaborated with composers and musicians, the Margie Jen- kins Dance Company, and artists such as Gerhard Richter, in addition to translating and editing. Alongside John Ashbery, Palmer has been largely responsible for provoking the recent fervor of cross-pollination between "traditional" lyricism and more "experimental" modes of writing in the United States, an often productive, rarely uncontroversial encounter that answers most frequently to the name "innovation."

It will be instructive to analyze Palmer's "The White Notebook," proem to The Promises of Glass (2000), according to the meridian comprising its author and two of his most important precursors, Paul Celan and Maurice Blanchot. "The White Notebook" contains "a certain amount of citation of Celan," according to Palmer, and responds to an exhibition by artist Irving Petlin, whose "Seine Series" includes hom- ages to Celan.l The poem flirts with other sources and surges, includ- ing Edmond Jabbs's The Book of Questions, Vermeer's art, Walter Benjamin's Das Passagen-Werk, and the Heidegger concerned with building and dwelling. While this array of explicit and implied quota- tions participates in what Palmer refers to as the "dual functions of dis- closure and withholding," Blanchot, Celan, and Palmer together constitute what the latter, evoking mythical idioms of direction and disorientation, has described as "three suns crossing a winter sky."2 It is precisely the question of "the infinite distancing of distance - its irrec- iprocity, its irrectitude" that is at stake.3 In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot articulates the influence of

I. Interview with Michael Palmer, conducted by Robert N. Casper, Jubilat I (Spring 2000): 125-26.

2. Michael Palmer, Notes for Echo Lake (San Francisco: North Point, 1981) 40. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as N.

3. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (1969), trans. Susan Hanson (Min- neapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993/1997) 386. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as IC.



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Judaism on modernity, particularly as that inheritance inflects writing. Our debt to Jewish monotheism, he asserts, is

the revelation of speech as the place where men hold themselves in relation with what excludes all relation: the infinitely Distant, the absolutely Foreign. God speaks, and man speaks to him.... Distance is not abolished, it is not even diminished; on the contrary, it is main- tained, preserved in its purity by the rigor of the speech that upholds the absoluteness of difference.... Jewish thought does not know, or refuses, mediation and speech as mediating. But its importance is precisely in teaching us that speaking inaugurates an original relation in which the terms involved do not have to atone for this relation or dis- avow themselves in favor of a measure supposed to be common; they rather ask and are accorded reception precisely by reason of that which they do not have in common. (IC 127-28)

Blanchot characterizes "speech" not as a dialectical system whereby two terms collaborate to engender progress or exchange comprehen- sion, but rather as a distance between speakers who hold themselves "in relation with what excludes all relation." In speaking, two individuals maintain a relation not with what they might establish in "common" but instead with what they mutually acknowledge in the other as foreign, inassimilable, "infinitely Distant." Beginning from the premise that the other can never join the self in the identity of a concept, Blanchot designates speech as what maintains separation. This relation is founded not on "proximity," generally assumed as the provenance of communication, "but rather on the strangeness between us," which is an "interruption escaping all measure" (IC 68). Regarding this infinite gap, however, Blanchot announces: "But - and here is the strangeness of this strangeness - such an interruption . . . would be nevertheless a relation; at least if I take it upon myself not to reduce it, not to recon- cile it, even by comprehending it." So while preserving each other's otherness, the speakers never relinquish relating as such, but rather con- serve a divergence that constitutes their "relation without relation" (IC 73). To speak is hence to seek the other, not as a mere aspect of the same, but precisely by refusing to render the other as an image or extension of the self. In guarding the other's infinity, speech resists the totalizing method of a dialectic that, in the service of knowledge and progress, would reduce its terms to mirrors of one another. Speech per- mits an unusual type of communication, such that "only an essential



120 Palmer Celan, Blanchot

discontinuity can retain the affirmation proper to it" (IC 82). Palmer hints at this version of communication in "The Painted Cup," which focuses on the "faces" of undesignated people and on "The angled/ areas between them then, cast/ in a range of hues/ that to speech are as distant,/ or dissonant, matter."4 This conception of speech is rehearsed throughout Celan's poetry.

"That which/ threw us together," he observes in Lichtzwang, "startles apart."5 "Kermorvan," from Die Niemandsrose, likewise invokes the other, with whom relation inaugurates distance: "with you near ones I make for afar" (SP 207). From the opposing angle, Celan affirms that "what was severed joins up again," that "at times when/ only the void stood between us we got/ all the way to each other," and that, "Apart,/ I fall to you, you/ fall to me, fallen away/ from each other, we see/ through" (SP 221, 163, 167). Celan's poems are attuned to the nuances of a relation in which speaker and addressee relate precisely by divi- sion. Moreover, the other in Celan is characteristically unknown if not unknowable, nameless or designated "no one," harboring a host of possible identities, from intimate lover to inimitable divinity, from splintered self to equally splintered reader. Foreignness is painstakingly preserved in alignment with Blanchot's asseveration that "there is an infinite, and, in a sense, an impassable distance between myself and the other" (IC 52).

If Celan's addressees are unfigured or unfixed, what remains constant is the vector at which his poems are pitched - toward the other. "I go and go. To you,/ beloved," he writes (SP 213), as if answering Palmer's question, "Does distance cause the call."6 As Celan expostulates in the "Meridian" speech, the poem, being "lonely," is ever "en route": "The poem intends another," he proposes, "needs this other, needs an oppo- site. It goes toward it, bespeaks it. For the poem, everything and every- body is a figure of this other toward which it is heading."7 The condition of possibility of the poem is an itinerary, and as the poem approaches the "altogether other," the other retains his alterity by not

4. Michael Palmer, First Figure (San Francisco: North Point, 1984) 40. 5. Paul Celan, Selected Poems (1988), trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil,

1995) 299. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as SP. 6. Michael Palmer, The Promises of Glass (New York: New Directions, 2000) 96.

Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as PG. 7. Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (New York: Sheep

Meadow, 1986) 49. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as CP.



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completing the advent it intimates (CP 48). The poem nonetheless holds its course, but whether it ever arrives to meet the other "in the mystery of encounter" represents an oscillation in Celan. Sometimes, such as in "Radix, Matrix," he appears certain that direct engagement is possible: "hurled/ towards me, you..,. you in the multi-night en-/ countered" (SP 191). Similarly, in "Tabernacle Window," he announces emphatically that "you are coming, coming,/ we shall dwell at last," elsewhere offer- ing, "I/ went out of the world: and there you were,/ you my quiet, my open one, and -/ you received us. . . . Easily/ your lap opened" (SP 217, 171). In each case, Celan believes that the "strangeness and distance" of poetry results in a meeting (CP 46).

At other points, though, he is less sure about the prospect of dialogi- cal intimacy, promoting instead an encounter founded on deferral. "A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue," he details in his Bremen speech, "may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea"; but he qualifies the nature of that conversation, adding, "with the - surely not always strong - hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart" (CP 34-35). Beyond establishing that poems "are headed toward.., . something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality," Celan negotiates the poem's will-to-hope: the poem nears an open reality or someone receptive, but this person or place is only approachable, inhabitable, a "perhaps" not certain to welcome the poem inside. The poem's course toward the other initiates relation without relation: the poem sends itself to the other who, in turn, directs itself to the poem - but each continues to uphold, rather than efface, the otherness of its origin by averring its destination. The movement of that double disymmetry is suggested by Celan's image of a "counter-/ swimmer" [Gegen-schwim- merin],s the root Gegen denoting both "toward" and "against." Simi- larly, Palmer's "In C" envisions someone "Pared and lettered to an edge/ of X, figured forward// toward a shore," while direction in Palmer's poetry generally harbors its own antithesis - "a door/ which would open either way."9 Moreover, his "letters" trace paradoxical, often truncated routes: if, as "Notes for Echo Lake" offers hopefully, "I don't think I have a right to leave your letter unanswered," nonetheless

8. Paul Celan, Breathturn (1967), trans. Pierre Joris (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1995) 64-65. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as B.

9. Michael Palmer, At Passages (New York: New Directions, 1995) 62, 23. Here- after cited parenthetically within the text as A.




distance still remains, such that, "This letter will never reach you/ and as long as we both know it's ok/ Did the other one reach you/ and if so what did it contain" (N 68, 41).

In refusing to violate or appropriate the strangeness defining the other, the hope with which Celan and Palmer invest the poem is allied to the hidden expectation that Blanchot assigns to relation without relation. "There is hope when, far from any present grasp, far from any immedi- ate possession, it relates to what is always yet to come, and perhaps will never come," Blanchot says. "The more distant or difficult the object of hope is, the more profound and close to its destiny as hope is the hope that affirmnns it. .. Hope bespeaks the possibility of what escapes the realm of the possible; at the limit, it is relation recaptured where relation is lost" (IC 41). Hence the poem awaits a reply, but it is precisely the impossibility of response that affirms the poem as an enactment of hope. "Something mobile, ungreeting/ as all that's turned into heart,/ is coming" (SP 199), Celan writes in "A La Pointe AcCr~e," witnessing an advance that is nevertheless "ungreeting," just as Palmer's speakers utter "hello and goodby" in the same breath (PG 35). Instead of deni- grating the impetus that incites an encounter it will fail to eventuate, aporia is the urgency proper to poetry. "Two-housed, eternal one, you are, un-/ inhabitable," another poem envisions, "That is why/ we build and build .... Come, beloved./ That we may lie here, this/ is the partition" (SP 197). Against the notion of an open elsewhere, Celan poses an "un-/ inhabitable ... here," which is the reason for building a site where "we may lie." This place, at once home and hiatus, bespeaks relation without relation: the poem and its "beloved" rest in a oneness that is "partition," justifying Blanchot's dictum, "We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love" (IC 110-11). If homecoming as dissonance is impossible, that impossibility guarantees the authenticity of the poem. Celan avows poetry as the space of impossibility when, apologizing for the poem that "heads straight for the 'otherness' which it considers it can reach and be free, which is perhaps vacant and at the same time turned . . . toward the poem," he declares, "I am talking about a poem which does not exist! The absolute poem - no, it certainly does not, cannot exist" (CP 48, 51). The poem founds its hopeful claim to encounter on its knowledge of intrinsic, imminent fail- ure. "The search for totality" is "the poetic claim par excellence," Blan- chot confirms, "in which the impossibility of being accomplished is



Andrew Zawacki 123

included as its condition,"l0 and Celan situates the poem's imperative and ultimate impotence in this same "u-topian light" (CP 51).

Yet despite the discordance between those who face each other, I and thou are positioned apart in a manner that facilitates mutual respect. "The encounter designates a new relation," Blanchot argues: "At the point of juncture - a unique point - what comes into relation remains without relation, and the unity that thus comes to the fore is but . .. the simultaneity of what cannot be together" (IC 415). This disjunction allows the terms to remain distinct while persisting to relate distance as such. Palmer's poetry frequently devises and traverses this "unique point," explicitly signaled in the penultimate section of "Seven Lines of Equal Length" by the claim, "The other, recurring difference holds us in place" (N 45). This tension between convergence and partition propels Palmer's work not only as a theme, but also through the form of its "severed music" (PG 43), as when "The Leonardo Improvisations" asks in staccato over four curt stanzas, "can// the two/ be drawn// the two/ be drawn// apart" (A 45). Celan, too, in stating, "I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem" (CP 26), signifies that the poem commences a relation that, at once, hails the other and refrains from reducing him to the same. "A gesture of recognition of the other, a handshake, a saying without a said - these things are important by their interpellation rather than by their message," Emmanuel Levinas notes.11 Celan is committed to notions of irruption and interruption, as the jagged syntax, kaleidoscopic grammar, and "cleftwords" [Spalt- worte] of his poems make clear (B 116-17) - to say nothing of his def- inition of poetry as "turned toward the human, but uncanny" (CP 42- 43). Blanchot emphasizes this human, unheimliche impulse, claiming that "the exigency of the impossible" within Celan's work often manifests strangers who "sustain ... in common" a "disorientation of distance that keeps [them] absolutely apart."l2 In common and absolutely apart: the relation without relation between

these phrases is succinctly designated by Palmer in "Notes for Echo Lake 2," under the clipped sign, "A part and apart" (N 11). That sign

10. Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire (1949), trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 104.

I1. Emmanuel Levinas, "Paul Celan: From Being to the Other" (1972), Proper Names (1975), trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 43.

12. Maurice Blanchot, Le dernier parler (1972; Paris: Fata Morgana, 1986) 35-37, 31. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as D. English translations are mine.




equally reigns over "The White Notebook,"l3 which thematizes the kind of Blanchotian-Celanian relation without relation while undertaking to offer itself as "speech." The poem's characteristically oblique narrative initially concerns "the two// impossibly young/ in the lighted room/ who speak only of rain," but the point of view soon shifts from the third-person to first: "I met her there at the crossroads.// I don't remember who spoke./ Two breaths, two patterns of echo." This slip evidences an arc from the disinterested vantage of observation to a personal mode of involvement. Yet, the voice of the poem admits to having forgotten who spoke; moreover, whatever was said is now characterized as mere "echo," a figure that preserves a degree of distance from an event. Hereafter, the reader cannot be certain whether "we" constitutes the lovers, or indeed whether the "we" named earlier should now be assigned to them retrospectively: "This was both before and after," the poem stipulates enigmatically, the skewed chronology undoubtedly meant to inform the reader's procedure no less than to inflect the poem's mise- en-scone. The final trio of couplets presents the realization of an encounter that has faltered forward, if erratically, throughout: "We met there at the crossroads/ near the small arcades.// I can't recall who first spoke,/ who said, 'the darkness of white.'!/ We shared one shadow./ In the heat she tasted of salt." Illuminated by the windows and mirrors of shops and galleries, the arcades are where the promises of glass are honored. The lovers have finally embraced, and scattered elements of the poem also converge in an associative relation without relation. The phrase "the darkness of white" reverberates against the poem's title and earlier passages about "the/ whiteness of the city when you say/ Paris is white," "The way white is said// rejoining an earlier whiteness," "the names for white:/ blanc de titane, blanc de zinc," and the "denialwhite" [absageweife] cited from Celan's Atemwende (B 98-99). Likewise, the final word "salt" establishes an indirect rapport with the phrases "mouth spurting," "rolling off the tongue," and "tongue to mute tongue." The question of speaking "first" recapitulates the sidelong glance at the "sta- tion clocktower" and the place "where each night in sand/ the hour sounds," as the lovers' erotic meeting resolves the passage "between the done and the not-yet."

The investigation of passage doubles as a confrontation with impasse.

13. "The White Notebook" comprises pp. 3-5 of The Promises of Glass and will not be more specifically cited hereafter.



Andrew Zawacki 125

After its opening utterance, "But we have painted over the chalky folds," which suggests that the lines to follow designate a counterword in an argument already underway, the poem is perforated by bridges: "Is it the arches// of the bridges now narrowed to slits?" the poem asks, recounting, "We have painted a bridge's eyes// narrowed." The anteced- ent of "it" is unstated and unstable: it may refer to the "scene" someone is "watching," to whatever "the fixed eye observes," or even to an altogether discrete, discreet object; the pronoun drifts along a quai of indeterminate relations without relation. The bridge conjures the Pont Mirabeau, where Celan committed suicide, and harkens to Heidegger's exposition that a bridge "gathers the earth as landscape around the stream."'14 Palmer's poem, however, deploys the image not as a vehicle that collects disparate elements of a milieu or "escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro," but rather as a mode of relation less communal than contrapuntal, separating what it appears to join. For these bridges are "narrowed to slits," with "eyes// narrowed," as if appealing to Celan's admonition: "No. On the contrary, take art with you into your innermost narrowness. And set yourself free" (CP 52). The bridge becomes a veiled conceit for the mode of communication that Blanchot espouses, "a speech that, non-unifying, is no longer content with being a passage or a bridge - a non-pontificating speech capable of clearing the two shores separated by the abyss, but without filling in the abyss or reuniting its shores" (IC 78). This suspicion of unity further permeates "The White Notebook" via

its focus on rivers, which rupture ideas of order, identity, and ensemble. "We have added/ silver to the river, dots of silver,// red, figures-which- are-not," the poem asserts, as if the self, comprised of "liquid/ voices," were unable to arrive at a stationary locus despite its unremitting self- fashioning. Allusions to a "river which has no center" and "River of dots rising/ stream of sand with no center" appeal to Heraclitus's conceit of reality as a watercourse that changes while appearing to rest. "As they step into the same rivers, different and <still> different waters flow upon them," the pre-Socratic observes, figuring the self as a flux.15 Palmer investigates this dynamic of fissure and unity throughout The

14. Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" (1952), Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971/1975) 152-53.

15. Heraclitus, Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary by TM. Rob- inson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987/1996) 17. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as F.




Promises of Glass, particularly in the title sequence, which proffers, "For a time I thought I was another," and, "You must have me con- fused with myself" (PG 18, 26). The self maintains relation without relation especially to itself, being both whole and internally parted. "[T]hanks to swiftness and speed of change," Heraclitus claims, the river "scatters and brings together . . . , forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs" (F 55). This state of simultaneous motion and merger is complicated by the accretive or decreative impulses of writing. "Art makes for distance from the I," according to Celan (CP 44), an avowal of interval with which Palmer concurs. "The I-I symmetry of autobiography," he argues, "manifests various degrees of brokenness and the work is realized within that fracture."''16 This poem's interroga- tion of what might "remingle and remake me" reinforces that commit- ment to discontinuity and dovetailing.

Moreover, the work is realized as fracture. "The White Notebook" is itself a "Scene which has no center/ or whose center is empty,/ elsewhere," its subtle narrative and hints of a thematic nerve center beyond its borders imbuing it with an eerie sense of displacement. The poem locates its center not inside its own interior but outside, within an imag- ined other. "Tell/ me what their names might have been," the poem implores, asking the other to give nomenclature to the poem that nonetheless uses words to invoke otherness. By inviting language from elsewhere - "what were last and first, what spells// the unfamiliar, awkwardly whispered, syllable?" - the poem indulges a dream of approximating a "zero code, wordless," yet it relies heavily on the vagaries of the very "language of rhythm and breath" it mistrusts. "Per- fect symmetry," Palmer adduces of the natural world, "could only occur at absolute zero temperature, with no randomness, but at true zero the rate of formation would be zero and nothing would happen" (WT 222). "The White Notebook" mines, if not mimes, this impossibility, being on one hand a lyric, compelled by a need to sing an "expanding sound" contiguously, while on the other, its anastomoses unsettle even provi- sional modes of completion. In this sense, Palmer seeks "to make the relations of words an essentially disymmetrical field governed by discontinuity" (IC 77) and to frustrate ordinary communication. "The White Notebook," despite its divagations and diffractions, however, is

16. Palmer, "Autobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment (Part I or One Part)," Writing/Talks, ed. Bob Perelman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1985) 222. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text as WT.



Andrew Zawacki 127

tentatively knotted by a fragile web of slant rhymes, word warps, and evasive semantic encounters. Listen, for instance, to these words, listed in order of appearance: over, under, water, silver, river, figures, are, their, were, unfamiliar, whispered, rider, cavalier, Vermeer's, other, expired, center, or, elsewhere, earlier, erasure, there, remember, before, after, clocktower, ochre, hour, near. The assonance that funnels these terms together, and that joins them to the poem's dilating significations, creates at the same time, through repetition and "patterns of echo," an estranging effect. That alienation is enhanced by the r sounds that veer in harmonic tangents: carefully, margins, awkwardly, Arab, horseman, narrowed, Paris, expired, observes, arches, grow, zero, "flowering toward origin," crossroads, patterns, spurting, window, turn, shared. Not to mention the cadre of phrases related by sound or sense: "cobalt, Kobolt, goblin"; "tendrils -/ tendons"; the spectrum of red, "two shades of blue," silver, and white; and "deftly" and "Delft," which, given the poem's fixation on "closed eyes" and "crossroads," summon Delphi and its portents for Oedipus. The poem relies on linguistic relations without relation, and its eccentric logic conforms to both Celan's assurance that poetic obscurity exists "for the sake of an encounter" (CP 46) and Blanchot's belief that Celan's "extreme tension of language" exhibits the necessity of "carrying one [word] toward the other, in a union that does not comprise a unity" (D 11). To maintain a toward that refrains from unity is the direction in which

"The White Notebook," like Celan's poems, is finally oriented. The poem asks eleven questions - "Did you bet// on the margins, the clouds?," "Didn't it turn me -/ he asks of his eye -/ didn't it polish me/ like one of its stones.. .?" - and none of the supplications can be appeased, if only because their reference points lie outside the poem's exterior. This questioning founds the poem as "speech," dependent upon an absent other who is nonetheless on the way, and to whom the poem relates in hope. While "The White Notebook" solicits the promise of an encounter, it preserves deferral since there is no end to the trajectory of its questions, hence no delimited space wherein the poem and its other can meet. Palmer's asymptotic engagement with the other is endless and infinitely generative, insofar as "We will never," in Blanchot's esti- mation, "have done with the question, not because there is still too much question, but because, in this detour of profundity that is proper to it - a movement that turns us away from it and from ourselves -



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the question places us in relation with what has no end" (IC 20). Palmer initiates an itinerary toward an other who is the poem's center, and in this way his poems are, as Celan apologizes if only ironically, "paths from a voice to a listening You" (CP 53). In its bearing toward an other who withholds a reply, "The White Notebook" inaugurates a meridian that joins the poles it keeps apart. As "I dig towards you," Celan writes, "on our finger the ring awakes" (SP 157): symbolizing the promise of eternality, that ring finds a corollary in both Blanchot's defi- nition, "To write: to trace a circle in the interior of which would come to be inscribed the outside of every circle" (IC 79), and Palmer's observation, "At a certain distance// twin bodies encircle a letter/ they have arrived at independently" (PG 72). No less than Celan's poems, "The White Notebook" is an "abyssverse" [Abgrundvers] redoubled as an "arrowscript" [Pfeilschrift], sending itself ceaselessly toward the other (B 136-37, 76-77). "But an arrow," as Jacques Derrida reminds, in an essay on the negativity that haunts language, "is everything save what it aims for": an arrow is never identical with its target, which remains apart.17 That very separation keeps the arrow and what it moves toward distinct from each other - even and especially when the arrow strikes its target. Hence the arrow, figure for a name that cannot be what it names, will always "miss even that which it touches, which thereby remains safe." Palmer's poetry enacts such a movement toward otherness that - relating without relating - keeps the other safe.

17. Jacques Derrida, "Saufle nom (Post-Scriptum)" (1992), On the Name (1993), ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. John P. Leavy, Jr. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 61-62.



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