Poetics - V

V

The word ‘zone’ contains a danger within it. It is attractive and repulsive at the same time. A zone is something someone has designated as an alien region, a terrain one normally is not allowed to travel in. A closed area, an independent and limited world that is separated or liberated from the world outside.
I imagine that every human being has within them a zone, a centre that is filled with energy. This innermost zone is the place where something dangerous is at stake. One’s dealings with the zone may be very different. Some will be able to live a whole life without really coming into contact with it, others will be knocked over by its forces.

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The innermost zone never allows itself to be defined, but it is not only an unconscious region, a hidden vulnerable centre or a psychic gravitation, even though it could be an infatuating thought, or rather the middle of being, thus an existential category.
As an artist one must have an especially conscious attitude to the fact that it contains material that is immobile. I can dive down into the zone with great caution, but must return as quickly as possible. There is a kernel that must be respected, material about which one must be silent, mysteries that must be allowed to remain as mysteries.
Thus the innermost zone contains something that can serve as a beginning, but must never be written through.. An artist who roams about in this zone is no better placed than African tribes who, after all the depots are emptied of food – either in panic or from sheer ignorance – starts to eat the corn that was stored away as seed corn.
The innermost zone is a complex value on consciousness, which is moreover connected with the anonymity that exists behind the deeply personal artistic striving.

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The innermost zone lives by that which ought never to be spoken aloud.

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In the work of driving language forward to poetry, the power may switch over into its opposite. When I demand total presence, I risk instead being destroyed by the forces I challenge. Rilke speaks of how one can contact one’s centre and either derive strength from it, which can be used to create, or expose oneself to being driven from the spot in an experience of total powerlessness. If the gaze seeks its way in and gets lost, things go wrong. Creation always contains a risk of mental splitting.
The awareness that the zone exists gives me strength to be myself. To be oneself ought to be self-evident, but that is not the way it is. It has nothing to do with spontaneity, it is a battle and therefore a great victory when it succeeds. The innermost zone is a field of forces from which the new must grow forth. The place can therefore not be protected enough. Only the awareness of the zone’s existence is of extreme importance. Carefully I can have dealings with it for time eternal.
Paul Celan is also knowledgeable about this type of topography, revealing a strange place on the map of the soul:

‘Meine Damen und Herren, ich finde etwas, das mich auch ein wenig darüber hinwegtröstet, in Ihrer Gegenwart diesen unmöglichen Weg, diesen Weg des Unmöglichen gegangen zu sein.
Ich finde das Verbindende und wie das Gedicht zur Begegnung Führende.
Ich finde etwas – wie die Sprache – Immaterielles, aber Irdisches, Terrestrisches, etwas Kreisförmiges, über die beiden Pole in sich selbst Zurückkehrendes und dabei – heiterweise – sogar die Tropen Durchkreuzendes –: ich finde… einen Meridian."


Approximately the same awareness that Rilke gives expression to in the formulation of a medial praxis, one written from the centre or ‘middle’, as one seeks for a reality that is not yet given.

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The notion of a 'middle' probably has a religious origin. In the Bible it is seen unfolded in many contexts. In the work of the mystic Angelus Silesius talk of the middle takes onthe character of the soul’s union with God:

IN DER MITTE SIEHT MAN ALLES

Setz dich in Mittelpunkt: so siehst du alls zugleich, Was jetzt und dann geschieht, hier und im Himmelreich.

When today in certain neo-religious movements n altered world picture manifests itself in a seeking for divine identity, it is not just a pure caricature of, for example, the internalised spiritual direction Angelus Silesius expresses, but also a loss of the Judaeo-Christian understanding of existence. All is not one, and we are not God. Poems cannot possibly be written from such a position. The story of creation is a narrative about multiplicity and separation. The innermost zone is not identical in two individuals. And above all: the zone – and the individual – are not one with God.