Kierkegaard said, “Faith begins where thinking leaves off.” It is a tag line those in long distance relationships might hold close to their chest. Escaping the absurdity of circumstance, or feeling hemmed in by the requirement of written correspondence, wills one’s own research in durational works, in the unedited everyday testing the stamina of artist, and future audience in tandem. I visited the letters of Romanian poet Celan and Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (written between 1948 and 1961, while bothentertained other liaisons) after a long distance relationship ended. Had I read these letters during the course of that relationship I’m not sure much would have changed, but I found great solace in each other’s unwavering support for projects and histories that could not immediately be divined or helped through the sensuality of eyesight, voice. “My dear, you, I am so glad this letter came—and now I have kept you waiting for so long too, quite unintentionally and without a single unkind thought. You know well enough that this happens sometimes. One does not know why. Two or three times I wrote you a letter, and then left it unsent after all. But what does that really mean, when we are thinking of each other and will, perhaps, do so for a very long time yet?” Celan writes Bachmann. She coos sweetly, “I have often reflected ‘Corona’ is your most beautiful poem; it is the complete anticipation of a moment in which everything turns to marble, and remains thus forever. For me, however, it is not becoming ‘time’. I hunger for something I shall not receive, everything is flat and stale, tired and worn out before it is even used... Take me to the Seine, let us gaze into it until we become little fishes and recognize each other again.” There are, of course, renovations underway in each of their lives. Celan must contend with undue guilt, losing both parents in a Nazi concentration camp, despite his urging them into hideout before their deportation. He survived 18 months in a forced labor camp and upon release in February 1944 became a medical auxiliary in a psychiatric clinic, later studying Literature and working as a translator for local newspapers in Czernowitz. He typed his first manuscript of poetry, including sonnets written during his labor camp days, and settled in Bucharest, then Vienna where he would meet a 21-year-old woman voraciously annotating Heidegger and Wittgenstein in her doctoral studies. Her father had allied himself with the Nazis and the British occupation of postwar Austria emboldened her to turn over the disintegration of promise and impossibilities of language. This, and Celan, would become central figures in a work called Malina. Celan allegedly filled her apartment with poppies and a month later moved to Paris. Letters between the two would grow fewer and fewer over passing years, Bachmann married to Max Frisch and Celan married to Gisèle Lestrange. The resultant text errs towards obligation, with “unsent draft” asterisked in headers and footnotes. Celan urges Bachmann to refrain from contacting him altogether and Bachmann plows forward, disbelieving or indifferent to the battering effects of postage returned. The dalliance reverses with a fitful Celan urging Bachmann to pause literary conferences to come to his aid. Facades and insatiable aims are worn thin; they have no choice but to forgive each other, to reckon with how living according to one set of estimations, is often antithetical to another’s. What holds, then and now, is the adoration and trust of one another as caretakers of language in time of global oppression, offering each other a hope that might have felt extinguished too early in one’s life. “I gained, I lost, we believed in ominous miracles, the branch writ large upon the sky, bore us, grew into the moon’s orbit, a tomorrow ascended into yesterday,” Celan wrote Bachmann. I struggle to think of a verse that encapsulates true communion better. “A tomorrow ascended into yesterday” is an apt way of saying you did not need to do all that you did, and you couldn’t have known you were even doing it, for that I am glad and blessed. Perhaps we know only a few of these instances in life. Celan and Bachmann were each other’s.
-Katie Calderon