Christos Giannaras: fragments – Χ. Γιανναρας: κομματια κι αποσπασματα

Σημερα παρουσιαζω κομματια κι αποσπασματα πο μια προσφατη συνεντευξη του Χρηστου Γιανναρα με τον δημοσιογράφο κ. Γεώργιο Σαχίνη στην εκπομπή “Αντιθέσεις”. Η συζήτηση έλαβε χώρα την Πέμπτη  3  Δεκεμβρίου του 2010 στο κανάλι Kρήτη ΤV.

Σε μια εποχη τοσο δυσκολη και τοσο προκλητικη ο Γιανναρας αρθρωνει λογο που συναρπαζει και μπορει να λυτρωσει. Ο Γιανναρας προκαλει και προσκαλει.

…αυτο που ζουμε σημερα ειναι μια συντελεσμενη καταστροφη, δεν ειναι ενα απλο αδιεξοδο…

…εδω και χρονια παρακολουθουμε καθε μερα την κηδεια μας…

…εχουμε παραδοθει στη ληθη και την αγνοια της πραγματικοτητας…

…η διανοηση και η εκκλησια απουσιαζουν απο τα δρωμενα…

…τα κομματα που εγκληματισαν κατα του ελληνικου λαου ψηφιστηκαν και παλι στις προσφατες εκλογες…

…μοναδικο ενδιαφερον στοιχειο ο η αποχη του 70%, αλλα κανεις δεν μιλαει για την αποχη…

…το μιμητικο μεταπρατικο κρατος που δημιουργηθηκε μετα το 1821 ειναι εκ γενετης και κατασκευης αντιπαλο του πολιτη και δεν ανταποκρινεται στις αναγκες των πολιτων…

…χασαμε τον μπουσουλα με την ψευτικη δυτικοτροπη ιδεολογια οτι για να ξαναγινουμε ελληνες πρεπει να στραφουμε στη Δυση…

…το κρατος ειναι υποταγμενο σε συμμοριες πολιτικων…

…οι πολιτικοι εκμαυλισαν το λαο με παροχες και εξαγορες ψηφων…

….το πολιτικο συστημα εχει καταρρευσει σημερα…

…με το συνταγμα του 1985 στην ελλαδα εχομε πρωθυπουργοκεντρικη μοναρχια, και κομματοκρατια, δεν εχομε πλεον δημοκρατια, το συνταγμα ειναι ιδιοκτησια των δυο μεγαλων κομματων…

…ανθρωπος χωρις γλωσσα ειναι ανθρωπος χωρις σκεψη…

…χουλιγκανς και κομματα εχουν χασει την ικανοτητα της σκεψης…

…δεν ξερουμε τι σημαινει το να εισαι ελληνας…

… η ελληνικοτητα σημερα εξαντλειται σε τυπικοτητες…

….ο ελληνισμος δεν παραγει πλεον πολιτισμο, ετεροτητα, δεν εχει δικο του προσωπο, απλα μιμειται …

…εχομε χασει την αθρωπια μας, ειμαστε κοινωνια της ζουγκλας και της χρησιμοθηριας…

…χρειαζεται να πραγματοποιησουμε αλμα απο την κοινωνια της χρειας στην κοινωνια του αληθους…

…πρεπει να ξεφυγουμε απο την εγωκεντρικη κτηνωδια…

… το να εισαι δημοκρατικος, δεν κρινεται απο το τι ψηφιζεις, αλλα απο την κριτικη σου ικανοτητα να επιλεγεις το μη χειρον…

… παρουσιαζεται αμβλυνση του ελληνικου φρονηματος – ποιος θα παει σημερα να θυσιαστει για το κρατος των συμμοριων;

…πατριδα θα επι να σε δενουνε καποια πραγματα με τον τοπο σου, χωρις τα οποια δεν εχει νοημα η ζωη…

…η αναγεννηση απο τη σταχτη θα ειναι εφικτη μονο αν σωσουμε μια μαγια  ηθους και τροπου συνυπαρξης … για να αναβιωσει η κοινωνια των σχεσεων…

… ηπολιτικη εχει νοημα μονο στο πλαισιο της κοινωνιας σχεσεων…

…η πραγματικη αριστερα που φαινεται να εχει εκλειψει θετει την κοινωνια στην πρωτη γραμμη…

….εδω η λεγομενη αριστερα εχει εκχωρησει τα παντα στα συνδικατα….

…η “εκπληξη” της γενιας του 30 μπορει να μας δωσει αισιοδοξια για το εφικτο της αναγεννησης απο τη σταχτη…

Heidegger-weg (Heidegger's Path) – Part I

(according to Heidegger)

“The whole history of philosophy is just an endless variation of the Greeks’ theme ,

which is the theme of the Being itself. “

Jean Beaufret, 1974

This post started as a description of my journey to Martin Heidegger’s hometown and mountain resort.

On the way it changed, it grew. The physical dimension and elements are now interlaced with a journey through time, and through the philosophical space. I published it in 2010, and edited it in 2019.

The material outgrew the confines of a  post and I had to split it in two parts, the first ending nominally with the second world war.

This journey is a tribute to the great modern philosopher and his work.

As a man, Heidegger was quite a controversial figure on many fronts. I touch upon some of them, but the post cannot exhaust them or cover them in any way approaching completeness.

Martin and Elfride Heidegger’s grave in the Messkirch Cemetery

Εκ του τελους αρχεσθαι.

The beginning is the end.

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.” MH

Martin Heidegger died in 1976 in Freiburg, and was burried in the cemetery of his hometown, Messkirch.

The beginning of my Heidegger physical journey was the small town of Messkirch, in Baden – Wurttemberg, near the Black Forest, where Martin Heidegger was born in 1889.

Heidegger’s father, Friedrich, was a carpenter. His mother Johanna, née Kempf, was a house wife. They were a family of poor means, who could not afford to send Martin to the university. Therefore, they enrolled him to a Jesuit Seminary.

Young Martin did not stay in the Seminar.  In 1909 he “escaped” and went to the University of Freiburg, where he studied theology and philosophy.

In 1917 he marries Elfride Petri who will remain his supporting wife until his death.

Some of the Heidegger scholars claim that his wife was very close to the Nazis and the NSDP and influenced him in making the worst decisions of his life.

Edmund Husserl – Photo courtesy of the Heidegger Museum in Messkirch

From 1919 to 1923 he served as an assistant to Professor Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg.

Heidegger developed Husserl’s phenomenology in a new direction. He shifted the emphasis from the meaning of consiousness to the meaning of Breing.  Husserl’s epistemological question “What does it mean to know?” is transformed into the question “What does it mean to Be?” in Heidegger’s conception.

Heidegger opposes the Husserlian claim that a person’s relation to the world and the things in it must be mediated by something in the person’s mind: beliefs, desires, experiences, etc. — what philosophers call “intentional content.” As he puts it:

“The idea of a subject which has intentional experiences . . . encapsulated within itself is an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are.”

After Heidegger became a Professor at the University of Freiburg, the relationship of the two men deteriorated and eventually broke down completely.

Husserl died in 1938. Heidegger did not attend his funeral. According to some people in Heidegger’s close circle, he considered this “absence” from his mentor’s funeral to be one of the great errors of his life.

In 1922 Elfride gave Martin as present the wood cabin (Hutte) in Todtnauberg, where she was going for skiing. This cabin became Heidegger’s refuge, the calm place to go and think, write and meet some people.

In Paul Celan’s poem “Todtnauberg”, written in 1967 after his visit to the cabin, the Sternwürfel, the wooden cube above Heidegger’s well (resembling a Mallarmean die in “Un coup de dès”), is metonymically linked by its star design to the yellow arnica flower, viewed as the Jewish star.

The Cabin in late October 

In 1923 he was elected professor a the University of Marburg, where he stayed until 1928.

Heidegger turned the Western Philosophy upside down, starting with Descartes, who considered that the human being is a mind located in a meterial body. Heidegger asserted that the human existence is a happening, a process that welds the human to the World.

For Heidegger, there is not mind, body, and world, but Dasein in-the-world, as a ‘unitary phenomenon’.

For Descartes, space is a matter of abstract mathematical coordinates and calculations in which things are located and move about; for Heidegger, space is how Dasein experiences things.

Heidegger’s determination to break out of the philosophical tradition is focused in his attempt to get beyond the subject/object distinction.

In 1924 he met Hannah Arendt, with whom he had an affair until 1926 , when she left Marburg University to go to Heidelberg and study under Karl Jaspers. Arendt is a key person in Heidegger’s life, as she became one of his strongest supporters when he was accused of being a Nazi. She referred to this as a personal “error”.

His next major affair after Hannah Arendt was with Elisabeth Blochmann, who was also studying at Marburg. It must be noted that with the recent publication of the letters between Martin and Elfriede Heidegger in 2005 did it become known that the Heidegger marriage was an “open” one, in that Elfriede likewise had affairs, including one with the family doctor who fathered her first son, Hermann Heidegger.

In 1927, Heidegger publishes “Sein und Zeit”, “Time and Being”, his unfinished masterpiece, and dedicates it to his Professor, Edmund Husserl.

Most of it was written in the Todtnauberg cabin.

In its original design, Being and Time would have two parts, each part comprising three divisions.

As published, the book covered only the first two divisions of Part One.

The third division of Part One is now considered to be covered by the “The Basic Problems of Phenomenology”, and the first part of Division Two by “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics” (see below”.

Divisions two and three of Part Two are essentially covered by  “The Basic Problems of Phenomenology”.

In this sense, the original design of Being and Time has been completed, albeit in an indirect way.

Within a few years, this book was recognized as a truly epoch-making work of the 20th century philosophy.

In 1928 Heidegger is appointed Professor at the University of reiburg, succeeding Husserl.

In 1929 Heidegger delivers his important inaugural lecture, What Is Metaphysics

and publishes his famous bookKant and the Problem of Metaphysics.

In the Spring of 1933, April 21, Heidegger is appointed Rector of the University and joins the NSDAP.

Heidegger attending a celebration at the University of Freiburg

On May 3, 1933 he joined the NSDAP party. On May 27, 1933 he delivered his inaugural rector’s address on “The Self-Affirmation of the German University,” whose ambiguous text is frequently interpreted as an expression of his support of Hitler’s regime.

His spell as a Rector is short lived. He resigns on the 23rd April 1934.

He is the first Rector to resign under NSDAP rule.

His inaugural rector’s address was found incompatible with the party line and its text was eventually banned by the Nazis.

In his lectures of the late 1930s and the early 1940s, especially those which he gave during the period in which he was writing Contributions to Philosophy, some claim that he expressed covert criticism of Nazi ideology. Heidegger says in the SPIEGEL interview:

“After I resigned from the rectorate, I retreated back to my task as teacher. In the summer semester 1934 I lectured on “Logic.” In the following semester, 1934/35, I gave the first lecture on Hölderlin. The lectures on Nietzsche began in 1936. All of those who could hear heard that this was a confrontation with National Socialism.”

The entrance to the Heidegger Museum in Messkirch

For some time he was under surveillance of Gestapo. He was finally humiliated in 1944 when he was declared the most “expendable” member of the faculty and sent to the Rhine to dig trenches. Heidegger reminisces:

The Spiegel Interview

“In the last year of the war, five hundred of the most eminent scholars and artists were exempted from any kind of military service. I was not one of those who were exempted. On the contrary, in the summer of 1944 I was ordered to dig trenches over near the Rhine, on the Kaiserstuhl.” (The SPIEGEL Interview).

I cannot of course cover this issue completely and even more, offer any explanations or assertions to the truth.

A lot of books have been written, heated debates taken place, and this will go on.

In my humble view, there is no doubt that Heidegger flirted with NSDAP in 1933,and failed miserably. He resigned from the Rector’s position and never resumed a position of power or influence. The way he rationalized this is of no interest to me. His work remained at large untainted by the Nazi rubbish and poison. There are slips here and there, but he recovers quickly and never returns to the fallacies.

The path through the fields in Messkirch

What I find extremely important though is that in his Spiegel interview, and earlier, Heidegger has never said anything about the Holocaust. I cannot reconcile the fact that he mentions that he was sent to dig trenches, but says nothing about the gas chambers.

It appears that the “Nationalist” Heidgger could not come to terms with the “Deutsches Volk” behaving like murderers out of control.

One of the things I would like to do in the future is to research Heidegger’s views on “race”. But this is for the future.

A sign on MH’s bench

Heidegger was attached to his homeland. When in Messkirch, he would go for a walk in a path crossing the fields, for which the German word is Feldweg.

Today the path is still there, but the bench where Heidegger used to sit and work is gone. Only a label on a tree informs the visitor that the bench was there in the past.

Messkirch is a sleepy town in the middle of nowhere. It is a town that appears to have disowned its son, Martin Heidegger. It appears like Heideger is covered by a cover of guilt and oblivion.

“Anxiety as the superlative disclosure leads Dasein to an authentic

awareness of essential finitude of human existence, and hence serves

as the foundation for the possibility of authentic existence in its intrinsic

relation to the anticipation of death.” MH

This post contnues in “Part II”.

 

Alvaro Mutis: Fragments

This post is picking up the thread from the one I posted on March.

This time I want to share with you some fragments from his work “The adventures and misadventures of Maqroll”, translated by Edith Grossman.

There is no continuity. Fragments are fragmented.

Fragment 1

Thinking about time, trying to find out if past and future are valid and, in fact, exist, leads us into a labyrinth that is no less incomprehensible for being familiar.

Fragment 2

A caravan doesn’t symbolize or represent anything. Our mistake is to think it’s going somewhere, leaving somewhere. The caravan exhausts its meaning by merely moving from place to place. The animals in the caravan know this, but the camel drivers don’t. It will always be this way.

Fragment 3

Everything we can say about death, everything we try to embroider around the subject, is sterile, entirely fruitless labor. Wouldn’t it be better just to be quiet and wait?

Fragment 4

In the ruins of the Krak (des Chevaliers) of the Knights of Rhodes, standing on a cliff near Tripoli (Lebanon), a nameless tombstone bears this inscription: “This was not where”. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about those words. They’re so clear, and at the same time they contain all the mystery it is our lot to endure.

Fragment 5

I am the disordered creator of the most obscure routes, the most secret moorings. Their uselessness, their undiscovered location are what feed my days.

(by association:

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule —
From a wild clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space — out of Time.

Edgar Allan Poe)

Fragment 6

Follow the ships. Follow the routes plowed by worn, melancholy vessels. Don’t stop. Avoid even the humblest anchorage. Sail up the rivers. Lose yourself in the rains that flood the savannas. Deny all shores.

Long live Democracy!!! (on the occasion of the 11th September 2001)

The 11th September 2001 is a black day for the USA, but also for all supporters of Democracy in the world. This is not because USA is a perfect democracy. It is because the use of violence in anything other than an attempt to prevent the opponents of Democratic rule from achieving their objectives, is an attack on Democracy and its institutions.The fact that the actors of the event were Muslim does not imply that the real conflict is a conflict between religions. The real conflict is a conflict between an Open and a Closed Society.

I believe that there is no better response to this tragedy than to strengthen the institutions in our Democracies, and galvanize our resolve not to succumb to the use of blind violence as a means of resolving issues.

In this spirit and frame of mind, I found no better way to commemorate the horrible event, than to share with you some fragments of “sophia” or wisdom, from the work of Karl Popper, as expressed in his work “The Open Sociaty and its Enemies”.

Pericles

The Golden Period of Athens coincides with Pericles. This is not an accident. Pericles is the supreme democratic leader in the city of Athens. In his two volume work, Popper begins with a review of Plato and his political philosophy, and continues in the second volume with Hegel and Marx.

In the first volume, Popper documents his view of Pericles as the supreme leader of democratic Athens, whereas Plato emerges as a conservative, supporting the oligarchy and the undermining of democratic rule.

Here is how Popper is quoting Pericles’ famous funeral oration as reported by Thucydides:

“Our political system does not compete with with institutions which are elsewhere in force. We do not copy our neighbors, but try to be an example. Our administration favors the many instead of the few: this is why it is called a democracy. The laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, but we do not ignore the claims of excellence. When a citizen distinguishes himself, then he will be called to serve the state, in preference to others, not as a matter of privilege, but as a reward of merit; and poverty is no bar.

… The freedom we enjoy extends also to ordinary life; we are not suspicious of one another, and we do not nag our neighbor if he chooses to go his own way. … But this freedom does not make us lawless. We are taught to respect the magistrates and the laws, and never to forget that we must protect the injured. And we are also taught to observe those unwritten laws whose sanction lies only in the universal feeling of what is right….

Our city is thrown open to the world; we never expel a foreigner…. We are free to live exactly as we please, and yet, we are always ready to face any danger…. We love beauty without indulging in fancies, and although we try to improve our intellect. this does not weaken our will…. To admit one’s poverty is no disgrace with us; but we consider it disgraceful not to make an effort to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect public affairs when attending to his private business…. We consider a man who takes no interest in the state not as harmless, but as useless; and although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it. [Emphasis in Popper.] We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling block in the way of political action, but as an indispensable preliminary to acting wisely….”

 The excerpt that follows is from Chapter 19 of the second volume, where Popper defines the basic rules that characterize democracy.

“….(the rules of democracy)… may be summarised as…

1. Democracy cannot be fully characterised as the rule of the majority…In a democracy, the power of the rulers must be limited; and the criterion of a democracy is this: In a democracy, the rulers – that is to say the government – can be dismissed by the ruled without bloodshed.

Karl Popper

2. We need only distinguish between two forms of government, viz. such as posess institutions of this kind, and all others; i.e. democracies and tyrannies.

3. A consistent democratic constitution should exclude only one type of change in the legal system, namely a change which would endanger its democratic character.

4. In a democracy, the full protection of minorities should not extend to those who violate the law, and especially not to those who incite others to the violent overthrow of the democracy.

 

5. A policy of framing institutions to safeguard democracy must always proceed on the assumption that there may be antidemocratic tendencies latent among the ruled as well as among the rulers.

6. If democracy is destroyed, all rights are destroyed. Even if certain economic advantages enjoyed by the ruled should persist, they would persist only on sufferance.

7. Democracy provides an invaluable battle-ground for any reasonable reform, since it permits reform without violence. “

 

La Dolce Vita – Fellini's Masterpiece

“The film first impinged on the world at large in February 1960 when foreign journalists reported back to their readers, listeners and viewers on the controversial reception in Italy, where it divided audiences, critics and clerics, and led to Fellini being both spat on and cheered at the Milan premiere.” (Source: Philip French’s film review in the Guardian)

“Jesus Christ swings over Rome in a breathtaking opening sequence; a statue suspended from a helicopter where Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) beckons to a gaggle of sunbathing beauties below. He’s a spiritually bankrupt man who pushes girlfriend Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) to the brink of suicide with his incessant philandering. Nonetheless he cannot resist ‘the sweet life’ of sex and partying, seductively embodied by Hollywood movie star Sylvia – a voluptuous Anita Ekberg framed like a goddess as she cavorts in the Trevi Fountain.” (Source: Stella Papamichael’s film review in the BBC)

The Fontana di Trevi scene.

And the unforgettable music of Nino Rota.

“It was I who made Fellini famous, not the other way around”. (Anita Ekberg)

Ekberg is quoted (in a TV interview) as saying “Mrcello was zero when I met him, I made him famous!”.

No matter what the real case is, both Marcello and Anita are beautiful and doomed in this movie.

“La Dolce Vita”  is actually a bittersweet life, with the bitter taste ever present, not letting the sweet enjoy a victory. Marcello never really gets around to the sweet comfort of victory or pleasure. He is always chasing, something elusive, without being able to actually experience something, as the object of experience is continuously fragmented and disjointed.

Fellini has described La Dolce Vita as “a journey through the inauthentic” (in Federico Fellini’s Autobiography, a documentary by Paquito del Bosco available on the Criterion Collection DVD, La Strada). The film displays an almost palpable anxiety over the question of distinguishing the authentic from the inauthentic, the real from the simulated; and it is because of Marcello’s inability to make reliable distinctions between these categories that the film steadily moves towards a sense of chaos and disorder. The pervasive superficiality and artificiality of the characters Marcello encounters suggest a psychology in which identity is always concealed behind a social mask, and masquerade and performance have become the key elements of self. Such a view of human psychology inevitably forces us to confront the irreducible distance between self and other, a distance that is most often represented by Fellini as a breakdown of human communication. …. La Dolce Vita is a dense, complex portrait of modern life; a scathing critique of media culture, of its artificiality and sensationalism, its squandering of social energy in pursuit of the trivial, its insatiable appetite for scandal and the thrill of “the new. And it is equally an analysis of the “modern” self, of the narcissism and vanity that underlie sexual desire and which inhibit any meaningful communication between human beings. La Dolce Vita is about the emotional and spiritual cost of embracing such values. And it is also an expression of Fellini’s own anxieties as an artist, his concern that as a filmmaker he is like Marcello, a chronicler of the trivial and the unimportant. The crisis in Fellini’s conception of himself as an artist and filmmaker would find its fullest fictional treatment in his next solo film, 8 1/2. (Source:  Fellini’s Roman Circus)

At the end, he encounters again the beautiful young girl from a little cafe he met earlier.  A profile like an angel.  She beckons to him, but he can’t hear her across the waves.  He goes back to his degenerate orgiasts who are leaving the beach where they were gawking at an enormous “sea monster” the fishermen brought in.  Might there be a shred of hope left for him? (Source: Journey to perplexity)

Marcello cannot hear what the angel figure across the beach of Fregena is telling him He knows very well that he is not going to stay there, that he is going to go. He will walk away from his only chance to redeem himself. Redemption appeared before him and he turns it away. Marcello actually watches his redemption ticket being burned.

La Dolce Vita is a big puzzle with a simple end, that there is an end, sooner or later, and there are only limited choices that appear in front of us.  The choices we make and the end are intertwined.

We talk a lot about the end. The personal end, as I cannot foretell or describe the end of the world or the universe, should there ever be such an event. What is the personal end? I do not know, I have not experienced it yet. But I have a picture of it in my mind, it is the circus characters’ band walking on the beach at sunset, when the daylight gives its place to the darkness of the night. (the photo is from Fellini’s 8 1/2).

Chillida: Gruss an (Hommage à) Heidegger

Δοκεί δε μέτα τι είναι και

χαλεπόν ληφθήναι ο τόπος

“It appears, however, to be something overwhelming and hard to grasp, the topos (that is place, space)”

Aristotle, Physics, Book IV

The Basque Sculptor Eduardo Chillida in the early 1960’s engaged into a dialog with the German Philosopher Martin Heidegger. When the two men met, they discovered that from different angles, they were “working” with Space in the same way.

Chillida has been quoted as saying: “My whole Work is a journey of discovery in Space. Space is the liveliest of all, the one that surrounds us.” He has challenged the Empty and embraced the Horizon. One might say that his mission in life was to give life to Emptiness.

In one of his interviews, Chillida said: “Heidegger wrote a book, The Art and the Space, that discussed my work: the idea of space as a living space that is in relation to man, and the idea that sculpture reveals the exact character of a space. Heidegger asked for my thoughts because he was astonished to find so many relations between his ideas and my ideas, translated into sculpture.”

Heidegger wrote: “We would have to learn to recognize that things themselves are places and do not merely belong to a place,” and that sculpture is thereby “…the embodiment of places.”

Against a traditional view of space as an empty container for discrete bodies, these writings understand the body as already beyond itself in a world of relations and conceive of space as a material medium of relational contact. Sculpture shows us how we belong to the world, a world in the midst of a technological process of uprooting and homelessness. Heidegger suggests how we can still find room to dwell therein.

Hommage à Heidegger.
Holzschnitt.
Van der Koelen 70016. Signiert und nummeriert. Exemplar 98/100. Auf Japanbütten. 13,8 x 17 cm (5,4 x 6,6 in). Papier: 20,8 x 17 cm (8,1 x 6,6 in).
Beilage zur Vorzugsausgabe des Buches “Martin Heidegger/Eduardo Chillida – Die Kunst und der Raum” von Erhard Kästner, St. Gallen 1970. Gedruckt von der Erker-Presse, St. Gallen, erschienen im Erker-Verlag, St. Gallen. [RS].

Chillida was asked and accepted to prepare the illustrations for the book that was first published in 1969. The illustration above comes from the book.

Gruss an Hiedegger, Frankfurt am Main (1994)

In 1994 Chillida completed his sculpture “Hommage to Heidegger”. The sculpture was installed in open air in Frankfurt an Main.

Anselm Kiefer salutes Martin Heidegger

For a long time I wanted to publish a sequence of posts for one of my favourite modern artists, Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer was born in Germany after the second world war and studied with Joseph Beuys.

His work is a journey inside German history and culture, a painful and horrific journey at times, establishing dialogues with figures that inhabit the realm of Culture and Tradition, depicting objects and tracing trajectories in space.

Through his multi-layered compositions, Kiefer exposes the tragic elements of life and existence, in all shapes and proportions.

I considered it appropriate to start the journey of experiencing some of his works with two works on paper that he “dedicates” to the Holy Monster of Modern German Philosophy, Martin Heideger.

Essence
“Essenz”
1975. Watercolor, acrylic, and ballpoint pen on paper
11 3/4 x 15 1/2 in. (29.8 x 39.4 cm)
Inscribed lower center in watercolor: ESSENZ
Inscribed on nine areas of white acrylic in ballpoint pen: Ek-sistenz [ex-sistence]
Inscribed lower left in watercolor: für Julia [for Julia]
Purchase, The Barnett Newman Foundation Gift, 1995
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Essence/Ex-sistence
“Essenz /Ek-sistenz”
1975. Watercolor and gouache on paper
Inscribed upper right in gouache: Ek-sistenz
Inscribed lower center in watercolor: Essenz
Inscribed lower left in watercolor: für Julia [for Julia]
11 3/4 x 15 5/8 in. (29.8 x 39.7 cm)
Purchase, The Barnett Newman Foundation Gift, 1995

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.


In Essence, the German word “Ex-sistenz” appears on each of several mountains rendered in plan view in thick white acrylic, and the word “ESSENZ” is rendered in black, the letters moving across the surface and weaving in and out of the mountains. Here, as in the accompanying work, Essence/Ex-sistence, Kiefer has used both graphic means and language to symbolize the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s ideas. Essence, it is suggested, occupies no particular material place, while existence has palpable physical presence.

Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan: Heart's Time wrapped in Darkness

Paul Celan was born in 1920 in Bucovina, Romania. He became one of the most prominent 20th century poets. Celan committed suicide in Paris, in 1970, before turning 50.

Ingeborg Bachmann, was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She wrote poems, libretti, novels and is considered one of the most talented German – Austrian writers of the 20th century. Bachmann died in rather strange circumstances in a fire in Rome, in 1973.  She was 47 years old.

Heart’s Time (Herzzeit) is the title of a book published in Germany in 2008 (the English translation has been published in 2010) containing more than 200 items of correspondence between the two lovers, friends.

Dr. Klaus Hübner observes in his review of the book’s publication:

“Love is always a very private matter, and it is only by means of the extent to which the lovers are known that an element of public awareness and interest is added to it. This is surely true in the case of the relationship between Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) and Paul Celan (1920–1970). The works of these two writers belong to the essential core of German-language literature after the end of the Second World War, and they also belong to it because, in their different ways, they are marked by the collapse of German civilisation during the Nazi era, above all by the industrialised murder of many millions of Jews and its unspeakable and unending consequences. What would German lyric poetry be without Bachmann’s Die gestundete Zeit from 1953 (title poem of this collection variously translated as Mortgaged Time, The Respite, and Time Borrowed) or Anrufung des Großen Bären from 1956 (i.e. invocation of the Great Bear)? Without Celan’s Mohn und Gedächtnisfrom 1952 (i.e. poppies and memory) or Sprachgitter from 1959 (i.e. language-grille)? What would the memory of the ‚Fifties and ‚Sixties be without the celebrated Gruppe 47? Our view of the post-war period would be incomplete without Bachmann’s and Celan’s verses, voices and photos.”

“Glorious news” the 21-year old Ingeborg Bachmann writes in a letter to her parents, the “surrealist poet” Paul Celan has fallen in love with her. It is May 1948, Vienna. Celan sends Bachmann his poem In Ägypten (in Egypt) with the dedication: “For Ingeborg. To one who is painfully precise (peinlich genau), 22 years after her birth, from one who is painfully imprecise.

Celan visits Bachmann in Vienna and stays there for a month or so. He then goes to Paris where he is going to stay until his death in 1970.

Visit “Once upon an Autumn” to read “Corona”,  the last poem that Celan wrote before leaving Vienna in 1948.

In 1950, Bachmann received her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Vienna with her dissertation titled “The Critical Reception of the Existential Philosophy of Martin Heidegger,”

Bachmann writes to Celan in 1949:

“Sometimes I’d like nothing better than to get away and come to Paris, to feel you touch my hand, how you touch me completely with flowers and then not to know yet again where you come from and where you are going.  To me you come from India or from a more distant dark, brown land, to me you are the desert and the sea and everything secretive. I know nothing about about and that is why I am often so afraid for you, I cannot imagine that you are doing the same things the rest of us are doing here, I should have a castle for us and bring you to me, so that you can be my enchanted lord, we will have many tapestries in it and music and invent love. I have often thought that “Corona” is your most beautiful poem, it is the most perfect anticipation of a moment where everything becomes marble and exists forever. But here it is not my “time”.  I hunger for something that I will not get, everything is flat and vapid. tired and used-up even before it is used.   in mid-August I will be in Paris just for a few days. Don’t ask me why, but be there for me, for one evening, or two or three. Take me to the Seine, we want to look down into it for a long time until we’ve become small fish and recognize each other again. ”

Although they are no longer “lovers” in the exact sense of the word, the correspondence continues stronger than ever. Ina Hartwig in her Frankfurter Rundschau review (published in 2008) relates.

“In September 1950 she will mention her first “nervous breakdown” and tell Celan that she is “lost, desperate and embittered”. She writes: “I have such desire for a little comfort” and she entreats him: “Please try to be good to me and hold me tight!” He obviously senses a good portion of stylisation here, in any case he soon cautions his now most sought-after companion to be “a little more sparing with your demands”. Because, he continues, she has “had more from life” than most of her contemporaries. Jealousy? This is the astoundingly sober reply to a letter from June 1951, in which she admits: “I love you and I don’t want to love you, it is too much and too difficult…””

Bachmann and Celan

In his article “Expressing the Dark“, Hans-Gunnar Peterson observes:

“What impelled her was a wish to work with death as a motif and with reflections on the hidden forces of violence and oppression in society. She was appalled and yet fascinated by the fact that crimes against humans are being committed on such a large scale also outside of the boundaries of war. “Since long have I pondered the question of where fascism has its origin. It is not born with the first bombs, neither through the terror one can describe in every newspaper … its origin lies in the relations between a man and a woman, and I have tried to say … in this society there is permanently.””

Bachmann with Henze

In 1953 Bachmann goes to Rome, where she works with Hans Werner Henze, the German composer, and writes two libretti for his operas: the Prince of Homburg, and The Young Lord.

In 1957 the two “lovers” meet again and their relationship is revitalized. But it is only an interlude. They go back to their own separate lifes until 1961, when Ingeborg experiences a writer’s block wen it comes to her correspondence with Celan.

Psalm
Paul Celan
No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower
Towards
you.
A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering;
the nothing-, the
no one’s rose.
With our pistil soul-bright
with our stamen heaven-ravaged
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, 0 over
the thorn.

Bachmann writes to Celan shortly before the “blockage” in her writing in 1961: “I really think that the greatest disaster is inside you. The wretched stuff that comes from outside – and you don’t need assure me of the truth of this, because I am well aware of much of it – is certainly poisonous, but it can be overcome, it must be possible to overcome. It is up to you now to confront it properly, after all you see that every explanation, every event, however right it might have been, has not diminished the unhappiness inside you, when I hear you speaking, it seems to me as if … it meant nothing to you that many people have made an effort, as if the only things that counted for you were dirt, maliciousness, folly. … You want to be the victim, but it is up to you to change this…” (Ina Hartwig ).

Bachmann with Henze in Rome

“Enigma” 1967

Ingeborg Bachmann

Nothing more will come.

Spring will no longer flourish.

Millennial calendars forecast it already.

And also summer and more, sweet words

such as “summer-like”–

nothing more will come.

You mustn’t cry,

says the music.

Otherwise

no one

says

anything.

After 1967 Bachmann almost sopped writting poetry and turned to prose. Marjorie Perloff explains:

“Why did Bachmann stop writing lyric poems?  In an interview, she remarked: “I have nothing against poems, but you must try to understand that there are moments when suddenly, one has everything against them, against every metaphor, every sound, every rule for putting words together, against the absolutely inspired arrival of words and images.”  What she means here, I think, is that, in the writing of lyric, she couldn’t seem to get around the male and patriarchal voice so powerful in German poetry.  “I had only known,” Bachmann admitted in 1971, “how to tell a story from a masculine position.  But I have often asked myself: why, really?  I have not understood it, not even in the case of the short stories.”  Then, too, Bachmann feared, as did her contemporary Paul Celan, that German lyric too easily falls into the trap of “harmony,” the harmony which, as Celan puts it, “no longer has anything in common with that ‘harmony’ which sounded more or less unchallenged, side by side with the most dreadful.”  The reference here is of course to the Holocaust: Bachmann was well aware of the difficulty Celan speaks of.”

‘For me it is not a question of a woman’s role, but the phenomenon of love – how you love. […] Love is a work of art, and I don’t believe many have the capacity for it.’ Ingeborg Bachmann said this in an interview in 1971. By then, her correspondence with Paul Celan was long over. In the early 1960s, Celan had been in the midst of an existential crisis that clouded his relationship with her. (Angelika Reitzer)

In late spring 1970, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, estranged wife of the poet Paul Celan, wrote to the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, an early love and life-long friend of the poet’s: “In the night from Monday to Tuesday, 19 to 20 April, he left his apartment, never to return… ” (Bachmann-Celan Correspondence, p. 197). (Ina Hartwig).

“My life is over, for during the transport he has drowned in the river’, says the dream ‘self’ in Bachmann’s novel Malina; and ‘he was my life. I loved him more than my life.’ (Malina: A Novel. Translated by Philip Boehm. Holmes & Meier, 1990.)” (Angelika Reitzer)

Discourse on Existence Ι

Do I exist?

I was recently asked to prove my existence. What follows is the first attempt.

But it is not a proof.

I is merely an invitation to discourse.

Υπαρχω;

Προσφατα μου ζητηθηκε να αποδειξω την υπαρξη μου.

Το πονημα που ακολουθει ειναι η πρωτη αποπειρα.

Ομως δεν προκειται περι αποδειξεως.

Περισσοτερο ειναι μια προσκληση σε διαλογο περι της υπαρξεως.

Ο Νικος Γαβριηλ Πεντζικης ηρθε πρωτος στο μυαλο μου.

Με το αστειρευτο χιουμορ του ειχε αναρωτηθει:

“Σκεφτομαι αρα υπαρχω. Οταν κοιμαμαι δηλαδη ειμαι πεθαμενος;”

Ας δεχτουμε λοιπον την ασυνεχεια της υπαρξης.

Κι οταν ειμαι ξυπνιος; Υπαρχω;

Υπαρχω οταν ταξιδευω.

Υπαρχω οταν ερωτευομαι.

Υπαρχω οταν αναπνεω μεσα απο το στηθος της Αγαπημενης

Οταν βλεπω μεσα απο τα ματια της.

Οταν την μισω περισσοτερο και απο τον εαυτο μου.

Υπαρχω οταν ειμαι ελευθερος

Οταν γινομαι απεραντος σαν την θαλασσα

Οταν μπορω να ζω χωρις τον φοβο οτι θα πεθανω

Υπαρχω οταν ειμαι ετοιμος να ανεβω στον χορο με τις νεες κοπελλες

Υπαρχω κι οταν χορευω μια ζεμπεκια για την Ευδοκια

Υπαρχω οταν πινω ενα ουζακι

Υπαρχω οταν μοιραζομαι ενα χταποδακι με τους αγαπημενους

Υπαρχω οταν σαλπαρω

Υπαρχω οταν εμβαπτιζομαι στην κολυμβηθρα του Αιγαιου

Υπαρχω οταν εχω μνημη

Υπαρχω οταν δεομαι υπερ των ψυχων και των πνευματων υμων