Celan did not himself pass through Fondane’s crematorium, but he has become a martyr in the eternity of “the total combustion,” and he has most especially become the unequalled martyr of death in the aftermath of survival. From which, behold, Poetry is born anew.
In the exile prior to exile of the exiles who were each marked by the premise of exile proper, Fundoianu / Fondane’s biographical and spiritual course precedes and prefigures Celan’s: “And there will come a night and I will leave this place” each had murmured during the successive delays of the inevitable, the alienation of the work tenacious in each. The soil, the ground beneath them, had been gradually replaced by the letter as Levinas says; spirituality now remained the only real dwelling place, poetry confirmed itself as the essential enclave, irremediable and irreplaceable. The valley in which they had been tolerated was a temporary rest stop, no more than that, a transient state, a respite where unbounded space metamorphosed into “the letter.”
The Jew Klein — and perhaps even his interlocutor Gross — lives below, in the valley where he was allowed to live from one day to the next, which is how life goes, from one day to the next. Only conversation does not develop in the Vale of Tears, which is to say in the Vale of This Life, but in the mountains beyond the mountains where the exiles and wanderers tramp with staff in hand — the staff that knows so many things — in search of someone to address, of the conversation partner with whom one may yet converse, be it even after death, in the posterity of the word.
They address one another. They’re Celan and Fondane. And is it no longer possible to address the Supreme Being who has become … a silent Nobody after the supreme devastation.
If the Supreme Being is in each of us, then He has passed away too, for the Supreme Being — by dint of the ovens in which he burned his sons and daughters, by dint of the complete combustion, of which only the ash preserves the memory — is incinerated too. Did he die with every one of them and in every one of them, or has he survived, ruined, with every one of us, in every one of us? — and consequently, in I (Klein) and in Thou (Gross).
These two speak, one to the other, and sometimes to the staff that knows them of old and accompanies them even in their postmortem ascent. Might the staff be a book? These two exiles are poets, and even if they were prophets or priests, the book would still be a reliable staff. The book, like the staff, aids in any ascent and not only listens, like the staff, but even converses.
I do not know if the two exiles of posterity carry some book with them through the winding curves that lead one toward the other, as I am tempted to suppose. I do not know because we are not told. It would not be at all out of the question, but we do know, in any event, that we are not told everything. It would not be out of the question … no, it would even be probable for them each to have a book, be it visible or hidden. It is certain that they carry a book in themselves, and more — written by them, themselves, and by the other and by the others.
And without doubt they hold Buber’s work inside themselves, in the form of his book, I and Thou, a volume the size of a pocketbook, known to both. It would be suitable, and not just for this reason. Definitively, this work also embodied the meeting and conversation on the mountain between I and Thou. Not at all by chance, it was and is most precisely an emblem of Judaic thought and feeling.
Sh’ma Yisrael! the sacred Hebrew prayer is an address: Hear, O Israel!
It is an appeal from I to Thou, before being an appeal from I to You (plural). Sh’ma Yis’ra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad! Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One! — the Lord is the only God.
The refrain, often repeated, in Conversation in the Mountains—“You hear me? Do you hear me? … It is I” seems an echo of the sacred invocation, emptied of the sacred after the burning.
The Supreme Recipient of Our Addresses — muffled in time and as a consequence of the total combustion — survives, though, as long as He claims to be the like of us and we of Him. He too survives after death. Did God die at Auschwitz? There existing no resort “more supreme” than the Supreme, God cannot die except as a result of His own decisions and actions, through self-negation, self-demolition, and abandon: by suicide, by Himself dispossessed of immortality, and dispossessed through his own lack of power, of sacredness. He who has lived All Things and All Times would have to live this too, in the image of and likeness unto mortals, as one of them. Powerless to stop evil, did he commit suicide in each of the slain? Yet he would rise, too, in each survivor, become mortal in every new generation, in the cycle of the ephemerals, brief as mayflies, the final solution to which He has yet to bestow upon us.
“The personalization, the personification, the embodiment: I cannot, naturally, describe the nature of God,” Buber warns us, but “it is permitted and necessary to say that God is, likewise, a person.” Thus, “the Other” too is himself “another.”
The need to address also contains the aspiration to address the unrepresentable, unpersonifiable divinity existing, nevertheless, in I and Thou, as in the potentiality of the absent semblable and in all that surrounds us, visibly and invisibly. The implacable authority has lost his authority at Auschwitz and in so many other sinister celebrations of death; dying with each of the martyrs, He has risen with each of the survivors, in this way becoming, like them, the mortal unworthy of immortality, in solidarity, finally, with all, like Him and like them, wandering with them in valley and mountain, and beyond valleys and mountains.
The dialogue in the mountains and beyond the mountains aspires to a greater resonance than it would have as simply the response of alterities. The poets speak to each other — one to the other — the one recently dead and the other long dead, just as Klein and Gross speak, those two yet alive, uncertain if one is heard by the other but addressing each other, and, perhaps before everything else, addressing themselves to the sacred Thou, which — post burning — has become profane.
“Man has addressed himself to his eternal Thou in many ways. But all the namings of God remain sacrosanct because human beings speak not only about God but also to God,” Buber writes. He asks himself how the “eternal Thou” might be able to be “inclusive and exclusive” at the same time. How would it be possible, with no deviation, for the “unconditioned” relationship with God to include all man’s other I — Thou relations and for them to lead to God?
God is not put into question, Buber answers, but the relationship with God: for this reason we cannot avoid speaking about “the wholly other” but also about “the wholly same.” It would be mysterium tremendum that overwhelms us, but also the enigmatic immediate evidence, the proximity “closer to me than my own I.”
The Other is God, who is in the other, as He is in me.
The transcendence of mysterium tremendum no longer resides in the heaven found beyond the heaven of belief but rather in the diurnal and nocturnal Word of Poetry, where the unknown, unfulfilled, and terrestrial ineffable has taken refuge. The need to address the other is the need to address me myself and, by way of me, the other in myself, and possibly an invisible eternal Authority that once dwelt in the other and that may yet persist.