No More Learning

Heidegger 's 1953 essay on Trakl, "Die Sprache im Gedicht," is best under- stood as a proleptic response to such readings. Heidegger refers Trakl's rup- tured discourse to a gathering point or place ("Ort"), which is always dislo- cated into the expressionless. 7 His "thinking dialogue" ("denkende Zwie- sprache") with Trakl's poetry is not an attempt to impose a conceptual structure upon the poem, rather, the discussion ("Er-o? rt-erung") is an attempt to specify the site of that poetry. That site, then, is the space of apartness ("Abgeschiedenheit"; 161) and marks humankind's return to the beginnings of its stiller nature. But it could also be argued that Heidegger seeks to render Trakl's poetry comfortable. His reading wants to soften the dissipation of Western civilization by gathering the poetic outbursts of "non-consignable intensities" to a quiet homecoming (Land 13). While the site of such silence or apartness, which gathers Trakl's poems into one, is what allows those poems to break from the hierarchy of conceptual thought and regain their intensity, this homecoming is nothing other than a pre-determined destination that prevents Heidegger's montage of poetic fragments from arriving nowhere. 8 The question that arises is therefore the following: how does one situate a reading of Trakl without re-connecting his voice to a master reader (e. g. , Rey) or a site of re-collection (e. g. , Heidegger)? As such, it is not necessary to iden- tify, as Heidegger does, the stranger who haunts many of Trakl's poems, but rather to identify what that figure is estranged from; we might thus witness him go under and depart but resist capturing him according to a master script. As we will see, "going under " or "falling" are terms which Trakl himself uses to describe Venice's promise.
Trakl's language is characterized not only by stylistic devices that reverse or signal a reversal of the imagery but also by a limited vocabulary that sug- gests an inability to engage difference. Readers have noted a certain ossifica- tion of terms that result, to paraphrase Heidegger, in the impression of all poems being the same poem. 9 In his attempt to free himself from the concep- tual reifications typical of rational perception, Trakl's art or techne is to dis- solve the boundaries of the objects and allow them to assume the attributes of the ambient setting. Kudszus has described it as follows: "Statt individueller Identita? t finden sich partielle Verbindungen und Fusionen mit Teilen der Natur " ("Sprachverlauf " 167). 10 As Kudszus has further remarked, in contrast to Ho? lderlin, whom Trakl read extensively toward the end of his life, the space
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opened up by such clearing of traditional conceptual categories (or as he calls it, "Grenzen-auflo? sung") is not an open one; rather, it is densely filled with im- ages of a re-constituted world ("Sprachverlauf " 169-70). For Trakl, the world that surpasses the everyday is in the systematicity of its reconstitution every bit as reified as the traditional categories of perception it sought to move be- yond.
V. A Sickly Smile: Trakl's Venice Poem
In Venedig
Stille in na? chtigem Zimmer. Silbern flackert der Leuchter Vor dem singenden Odem Des Einsamen;
Zaubrisches Rosengewo? lk.
Schwa? rzlicher Fliegenschwarm Verdunkelt den steinernen Raum Und es starrt von der Qual
Des goldenen Tags das Haupt Des Heimatlosen.
Reglos nachtet das Meer.
Stern und schwa? rzliche Fahrt Entschwand am Kanal.
Kind, dein kra? nkliches La? cheln
Folgte mir leise im Schlaf. (Trakl I, 131).
Trakl's poem was written in March of 1914, eight months after his return from Venice in August of the previous year (II, 232). It is testimony of sorts to a strategy for departing Venice. More specifically, the poem makes mention of a lonesome or homeless figure, but that figure's departure is the result of a specific process. It is only after following the dialectical movement to its point of petrification that the figure is able to resist the irrepressible sweep of that movement and follow a course of departure at the horizon of the canal. This departure need not be understood as active leave-taking. The poem's progres- sively dialectical rhythm comes to bracket out that figure to the point where the figure can only be said to have taken leave. The figure's departure signals what the dialectic produces but cannot contain.
The stillness in the room that establishes the opening mood of the poem does not oppose or contradict the singing breath of the lonesome one two lines later. Rather, as a fragment, punctuated nonetheless by a period, the nocturnal stillness marks a halt to the everyday conceptual categories that would other-
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wise assign the singing to the figure rather than his breath. That the move- ment of the breath seems to effect a silver flickering of light in front of the breath emphasizes a dissolution of categories of causality. The source of the silver is itself uncertain. It may be the candlestick, or maybe it is the result of filtered moonlight with what would otherwise be the yellow light of the candles. It might also be the hue assumed by the singing breath of the lone- some one. In any case, the silver is detached from any definitive source, and that break lends the room a surprising, if not dazzling, cast. Flickering implies the instability of the perceptual field, which in this case announces a silver brilliance hardly expected of flickering candlelight. It could also be said to give one "breathing room," and so given the space to move about, the breath can be said to be singing. The summary phrase that concludes the stanza ("Zau- brisches Rosengewo? lk") is hardly surprising. "Magical" correctly describes a space in which attributes move about independently from their agent or sub- stantive. Clouds could refer to singing silver breath. Since these clouds are rosy, they more likely express a continued dissolution of fixed contours. The unanticipated change of color merely re-affirms how the stillness has released the room from the markers of a reified consciousness; the room can appear in a manner defiant to the established categories of our understanding.
Not unexpectedly, the apparent openness of the room soon closes in upon itself in darkened petrification ("Schwa? rzlicher Fliegenschwarm/Verdunkelt den steinernen Raum . . . "). What provokes this sudden transformation is, if we refer to the language used above, Trakl's conscious attention to the sup- pressed counter rhythm of the opening stanza. In the specific language of the poem, the black swarm can be said to be the counter rhythm of the silver flick- ering. The room is silver as long as one follows the movements of light, but flickering can occur only if these moments of light are counterpoised by ones of blackness. It is Trakl taking note of that second movement that accounts for the abrupt change in atmosphere. That the torment of this movement is fixed to the daytime only confirms the reversal. Surprising about the stanza is how quickly the movement petrifies. In "Die Nacht," for example, the poem tra- verses a startling series of images in "hunting down god" before it comes to configure the futility of its movement. "In Venedig," presents us with an image of that insolubility less than half way into the poem and essentially reformulates that image in lines eight and nine: "es starrt. . . das Haupt. " If we recall that the poem begins the final section of Sebastian im Traum, the image is hardly pre-mature. As the first moment in the song of the departed one, "In Venedig" serves to point toward a path that leads away from a movement whose petrification has been traced and rehearsed in the previous sections. In the poem "Winternacht" that concludes the previous section "Siebengesang des Todes," images of frost and ice, stone and metal abound (128). That Trakl has not yet happened upon a path to escape the ossification of being tossed back and forth is confirmed in that poem's final lines. The black sleep of win-
BLOCK: Trakl 219
ter and the flaying of God's vultures are followed at the eastern gate by the sil- ver entry of the rosy day. (I, 128, emph. mine). "In Venedig" merely repeats in its imagery and movement what has just transpired. What it must now signal is not merely a conscious re-invocation of rhythm and counter rhythm but also a break or halt in the dialectic's relentlessness.
A suggestion of such a break can be found in the beginning of the eighth line: "Und es starrt . . . " Rather than rely on formulaic devices to effect yet another reversal, Trakl chooses instead to pursue the counter rhythm further. Both the conjunction and the verb serve to extend the movement of the previ- ous line. Movement out of this torment ("Qual") is prepared by the "es. " As an empty subject, it displaces the sentence's actual subject to the point of home- lessness ("das Haupt des Heimatlosen"). The head, which in "Die Nacht" served as figuration of the dialectic's ineluctability, now leads to a space resis- tant to that dialectic's totalizing rhythms. For by definition, the homeless one is always departing, eluding in his wandering any form of containment.
The first three lines of the final stanza complete the shadowy landscape of departure: "Reglos nachtet das Meer. /Stern und schwa? rzliche Fahrt/Ent- schwand am Kanal. " The first line emphasizes how the prevailing force of the dialectic has been broken. The next two present a siting of departure from that force field. One could even argue that the use of "ent-schwand" instead of "ver-schwand" suggests that in this instance disappearance is enacted by virtue of a breaking away from what had previously held that course ("Fahrt") --not by the figure but by the poem's rehearsal of its own dialectic. The break portrayed by the verse's imagery is enacted literally with the apostrophe that begins the poem's final sentence: "Kind, dein kra? nkliches La? cheln/Folgte mir leise im Schlaf. " It is a speaking outside of the previous narrative of the poem, a gesture uncontained by the poem's previous dialectical rhythm. Moreover, the unidentified child with its sickly smile becomes an autoformation of the poem, demonstrating its independence from the will of the subject. The child, like the homeless one, stands irretrievably outside; the mark of its mortality, its sickliness, assures that it cannot be appropriated and preserved under reified structures of consciousness. The poem has forced and traced the move- ments of the dialectic to a point of rupture and has now broken free of its paralysis and fear--its petrification. It has configured its own route of escape by attending to the signs of its finitude, by picking up in the unexpressed counter rhythm the going-under of what has surfaced. In other words, Trakl can forgo the compulsion to represent the omnipresence of the will. What Heidegger says of Trakl's use of the word "leise" is particularly fitting here:
Immer kehrt in Trakls Dichtung dieses "so leise" wieder. Wir meinen, "leise" be- deutet nur: kaum merklich fu? r das Ohr. In dieser Bedeutung wird das Genannte auf unser Vorstellen bezogen. Aber "leise" heisst: langsam, gelisian heisst "glei- ten. " Das Leise ist das Entgleitende (XII, 39).
220 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Spring 2005
The use of the past tense in the last stanza of the poem supports Heidegger 's claim. That shift from the present tense, coeval with the introduction of the lyrical "I" (mir), signals that the "I" has already moved on.
One could also remark that the sickly smile, by contradicting what one would ordinarily expect of youthful expression, is already eliding expecta- tions. More important for this discussion is--in keeping with Heidegger's remarks--how the smile is consistent with a notion of departure, how it conceals or holds back. In departing one slips away like the homeless into the uncharted. Likewise, a child's sickly smile conceals in its smile what ails the child. Or more accurately, it reveals what it conceals; namely, that the smile is a mask placed over what will soon defeat that expression. The smile does not offer itself up fully; it slips away quietly. It likewise announces its own depar- ture; just how long can a sick child maintain its smile? That is also what accompanies Trakl into sleep; perhaps it is even what he dreams of, or, if we attend to the work's title, what "Sebastian im Traume" dreams. Like sleep or dream, the smile is withheld from the wakeful gaze of the appropriating self. It will present itself neither fully nor enduringly enough, always charting at its corners its demise, preserving in its sickliness its secret. And so that smile is what necessarily brings Trakl to rest from the ceaseless oscillations and torment that haunt and animate the imagery of his poems.
VI. Suspended in the Mirror of the Sea: Trakl in Limbo
Thetitleofthepoemthatfollows"InVenedig"describesascloselyaspos- sible the site of the departed one: "Vorho? lle" (I, 132-33). He/she is in a perma- nently transitional stage that never ends up anywhere--somewhere in re- move from the dialectical rhythm that had tossed the poet into heaven and then hell. Not that a similar and equally dramatic shift in the imagistic register of the following poems does not occur. On the contrary, departure depends on an enactment of attending to the counter rhythm of what is expressed; it executes a break from the apparent totality of Venice. To stop enacting is to offer oneself up for re-appropriation. Hell's antechamber is reserved for those who remain as nameless as the child or as siteless as the homeless.
Nietzsche's "Venedig" is evidence of the torment of being on the inside. Any attempt at self-overcoming or coming over to another side only inscribes him more stubbornly in the structure of what was to be overcome. Rilke moves away from the totality engineered by his language. He often ap- proaches it with distrust, although such distrust does not appear to erode the basis for belief in totality. Rilke's poem functions as a substitute, and while the incompleteness or speciousness of its gesture cannot remain masked for long, it nonetheless enlists Rilke in its economy. "Fatal" about Venice may be not only its radiance but its fading back into the sea as well. Its destinal truth is the
BLOCK: Trakl 221
revealed fabrication of its figure. Language, which would allow the complete- ness of the inner world to presence itself, is unreliable, unable to legitimate anything outside itself and so sustain the claims of its absolute expressivity. What this "absence of a reliable referent" brings about, however, is a shift in those claims (de Man 47). In the third sonnet of the second part of Die Sonette an Orpheus, Rilke compares the mirror to the interstices of time and asserts that no one has ever knowingly described it (508-09). The suggestion is that what presences itself, even in the poem, is temporally dislocated from its essence, from the horizon that allowed it to show itself. The final stanza performsthatdislocation:"AberdieScho? nstewirdbleiben,bis/dru? beninihre enthaltenen Wangen/eindrang der klare gelo? ste Narziss" (508). The poem is still unable to capture the essence of the mirror. Just where or when the image enters the mirror is impossible to locate; apparently it is in the interstices of time introduced either by the comma in the first line, the break between lines one and two, or simply "over there. " The image captured by the poet's lan- guage is thus asymmetrically related to its essence, which unlike the complete inner world of the Dinggedichte now seems to be an empty midst. Dislocation ("dru? ben") is the condition of all images, and the emptiness of the midst is what frees the image and conditions its appearance.
Trakl's state of limbo is, it would seem, curiously related to Rilke's suspen- sion in the mirror. The exact nature of that relation cannot be explored here. At least in 1917, Rilke hardly was about to recognize himself in reading Trakl. He compared Trakl to Li Tai Po, a Chinese poet of the eighth century. Legend relates that the poet met his death after drunkenly falling from a boat trying to reach after the moon's reflection. "Es fa? llt mir ein," Rilke writes, "dass dieses ganze Werk [Trakls] sein Gleichnis ha? tte in dem Sterben des Li-Tai-Pe: hier wie dort ist das Fallen Vorwand fu? r die unaufhaltsame Himmelfahrt" (Briefe 126-27). Rilke's suspicion of Trakl's work, ("Wer mag er gewesen sein? ") might seem surprising coming from a poet whose next major work, Duiniser Elegien, would close with an image of falling. 11 From what has been said above, it is clear that Rilke recognized in Trakl a need to slip away in order to re-sur- face on the other side of consciousness--although by what standard or mea- sure would Rilke or anyone catch sight of such resurfacing? Nonetheless, Trakl himself seems to have been aware of the heavenly possibilities that Ven- ice offered to the one falling. Writing to Buschbeck on 15 August 1913, he re- marks: "Lieber! Die Welt ist rund. Am Samstag falle ich nach Venedig hin- unter. Immer weiter--zu den Sternen" (I, 523).
Notes
1 See Heidegger, Parmenides (vol. 50). Also see Foti, 30-43.
2 Myuseofthe"expressionless"isintendedtounderlinehowanythingthatissaid in Venice is always already determined. Thus the need to formulate what is not pre-
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scribed. That is also why one can speak of its totalizing rhythm. See Benjamin for a dis- cussion of the expressionless, 115.
3 EnglishparaphrasesofTrakl'sversesrefertoFirmage. Allothertranslations,un- less indicated, are mine.
4 See Peucker for an alternative reading of Trakl's relationship to language.
5 Trakl'sdrugaddictionandearlydeatharetwosuchindicationsofhowhisbiogra- phy could be read to support such claims. More often, the tendency has been to look to his incestuous relationship with his sister as a sign of his inability to get outside of him- self. For a solid examnation of his relationship with his sister, see McLary.
6 The critical edition of Trakl's letters uses a numbering system. It has become common practice to refer to this letter to his friend Ficker as the 106th.
7 Since a summary of the entire text is impossible here, I offer the following few ci- tations from the opening sections to clarify Heideigger's strategy for reading Trakl as well as his understanding of how his poetry emanates from an unspoken gathering point which might be called the poem of poems: "Jetzt gilt es, denjenigen Ort zu ero? rtern, der das dichtende Sagen Georg Trakls zu seinem Gedicht versammelt, den Ort seines Gedichtes. "
"Jeder grosse Dichter dichtet nur aus einem einzigen Gedicht. [. . . ] Das Gedicht eines Dichters bleibt ungesprochen. [. . . ] Dem Ort des Gedichtes entquillt die Woge, die jeweils das Sagen als ein dichtendes bewegt" (vol. 12, 33-34).
8 Heideggerforgoesanalysisofanyonepoemandattendsinsteadtobitsandpieces of 43 different ones.
9 Brown suggests that the reversals in Trakl's poetry are the result of "gratuitous substitution" and so lead to a meaningless interchangeability, 46. Also see Grimm for how such linguistic devices allow him to feign vertiginous suspension in space, 303-04. I am arguing that Trakl consciously invokes such mechanics as a means to chart a way out of this dialectic.
10 See Kudszus, Poetic Process, for a more extensive account of these mechanics.
11 See Finck for a discussion of Trakl based on this remark by Rilke, 115-25. As Rilke's remark indicates, Trakl elides identification; he appears, to paraphrase Foti, to be already displaced into a pastness incapable of being brought forward (Foti 20).
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