Second: What Do I See?
Paul Celan (1920-1970) is a famous post-World War 2 German (Romanian-born), Jewish poet. His poem gives me pause. Literally it stops me in my psycho-semio-soma tracks. I am not sure what the poem means.
But I can feel it affect me into the pit of my stomach. It makes me want to cry.
So one idea emerges to hang on to and to which we (you and me) will return shortly- ‘the pause’.
Stop before judging.
Stop before knowing.
Feel things deeply first. Then…
Another idea is that “I must carry you”. This short phrase summarises I think what it is that ‘we’ need to do in light of the Anthropocene. That is, “carry one another”. This carrying is not only a human affair now- it ‘operates’ across humanism and its ‘posts’.
We, humans of the “West” (the Globalised North), have separated out ourselves from ‘nature’ – to make ‘it’ comprehensible, knowable, substantial, exploitable.
And we have done the same thing to one another.
We have made ourselves knowable. Separated ourselves out; one from another.
And now we have lost our sense that this partitioning between one another is not the truth. Before anything else we are not individuals- we are in this together- and more than that we are in this together with ‘the world’.
Vulnerably so.
When we are born- we can not live without the support of others. Likewise our death is not ours alone.
‘The world is gone’. The world has carried ‘us,’ and now it is gone.
In the poem, I think what Paul Celan is saying is that when you die the world dies.
This is not metaphorical. This is an important point- it is not just a reminiscence about a lost love, or losing an ‘other.’
This is a truth about ‘the world’. ‘We’ (human-natures) are here now in this together.
And the world is in itself a totality that is composed and is composing and recomposing itself continuously- feeling its way into an ongoing renewing existence.
So that when you (not in the sense of anyone, but you specifically) die, the world, the reality of it, no longer exists.