Episode 49: Variations on the Right to Remain Silent Poetry Koan

Being an Anne Carson megafan (looking forward to her new collection Wrong Norma published this month) I decided to spend an evening with an artefact she created in 2016 called Float comprising 22 chapbooks held together in whatever order you choose to read them in, one of which is an essay that I’m about to read here.

This essay, "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent", is also linked to my favourite poem in Float which can be found in the chapbook Candor, written originally for a performance piece with dancer Rashaun Mitchell.



COULD I

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.



I've called "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent" an essay, but I prefer to think of it as An Event, or a kind of Performance - or a weird and delightful lecture.

If you’re anything like me, finding such a koan is usually followed by an overwhelming desire to share. Hence. 



POEMS REFERRED TO IN THIS EPISODE:

Fragment 286


In spring, on the one hand,
the Kydonian apple trees,
being watered by streams of rivers
where the uncut garden of the maidens [is and vine blossoms
swelling
beneath shady vine branches,
bloom.
On the other hand, for me Eros lies quiet at no season.
Nay rather,
like a Thracian north wind
ablaze with lightning,
rushing from Aphrodite
accompanied by parching madnesses,
black, unastonishable,
powerfully,
right up from the bottom of my feet [it] shakes my whole breathing being.


-Ibykos (translation by Carson)



Tubingen, January


Eyes talked over
to blindness. Their—
riddle is the purely
orginated"—, their
memory of
swimming Hölderlintowers, gull-
whirredaround.


Visits of drowned joiners to
these
diving words:

Came,
came a man,
came a man to the world, today, with
the lightbeard of
the prophets: he could,
if he spoke of this
time, he
could,
only stammer and stammer,
over-, over-
againagain.

("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")



-Paul Celan (translation by Carson)

TOPICS/THEMES:



Adam and Eve,

Aphrodite,

Artistic representation and interpretation,

Authenticity and translation,

Bacon, Francis,

Catastrophe as a creative force,

Celan, Paul,

Cliché and its avoidance,

Communication barriers,

Consciousness and self-awareness,

Divine versus human language,

Greek lyric poetry,

Historical and cultural translation,

Hölderlin, Friedrich,

Immortality and the divine,

Individual versus authority conflict,

Joan of Arc,

Language's limitations and potential,

Madness as a method of understanding,

Metaphorical versus literal interpretation,

Mythology's influence on art and literature,

Nature of reality and perception,

Personal identity and expression,

Power of silence and absence,

Rembrandt,

Relationship between language and thought,

Role of the translator,

Sacred versus profane knowledge,

Struggle against conventional norms,

Subjectivity of experience,

Untranslatability and the ineffable,

Violence and its representation