"Cultivation of Intimacy": "Denn mein Herz gehört den Toten an!" (Hölderlin)

Saturday 8 August 2009

"Denn mein Herz gehört den Toten an!" (Hölderlin)

"My heart belongs to the dead!" exclaims Hölderlin in a poem written in April 1794. As any reader, perhaps, awakened to the dire reality of the living.

But isn't that the human condition par excellence? The condition of reading – loving that which is no more or perhaps never was, and still is – even more than what "really" is?

Love for the ephemeral. For that which will soon cease being. Any moment.

Love for God, too. For "God is dead". Don't we, the "Christians" (and I would always emphasize my "religious atheism"), actually love the God who became flesh, the perishable god, the Son of Man? The God who could always perish, and did, too. The Lovable God instead of the God to be Feared (I get no reasonable top Google results for "fearable"). The Suffering God instead of the Eternal and Immaculate.

Maybe this is just my perversion – as a non-believer – but the story of Good Friday as a non-happy end seems more intriguing and cathartic than its sequel, the story of resurrection, etc. etc.

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Click on the thumbnail below to read Hölderlin's Griechenland (Apr. 1794) in Sattler's Bremen edition (Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe und Dokumente, ed. Sattler [München: Luchterhand, 2004], 26-28). I trust this fits within the rules of Fair Use. Sorry for the less than perfect quality of the scan.

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Why "Cultivation of Intimacy"? And why in English?

Why am I writing this weblog in English? The reason for anticipating this question is that my "native language", my "mother tongue", is Finnish. To be exact, in English the language is called "Finnish", but the Finnish-speaking Finns call their native language, in their mother tongue, suomi.

The Finnish name of Finland, namely the Finnish-language name of Finland, is Suomi, and the Finnish name of Finnish is suomi. Why's that? What does it mean? Etymologies tend to be uncertain, of course, but the name Suomi might refer to "fen" ("marsh", "swamp", "bog"; in Finnish, suo). Finland would be fen-land, which it also is, to be sure. And Finnish would be not only a Finnic but also a fennish language, suomi would be "swampy". Suomi Finland, i.e. Swampy Fenland. (See the OED for all this, if you will, entries fen and Finn and fennish and so on; including the entry on the postfix -ish.)

But on the other hand, suomi might also be the past tense, third person singular of the verb suomia, "to whip", "thrash", "flog" ([hän] suomi: "[he or she] flogged [someone]"). In modern use, this verb is most often used "figuratively" or "in a transferred sense", more or less equivocal to "to reproach", "to abuse (verbally)", etc.

The verb form suomi could also be the second person singular imperative: "Whip!" "Thrash!" "Reproach!" "Abuse!" The noun suomu means "scale", so that the verb suomia might even refer to an activity of "scaling by flogging", "removing scales by thrashing", "whipping so hard that the scales (and fins?) drop".

Why don't I suomi, then? Why don't I whip (in) my "mother tongue"? Well, one thing should be clear, to say the least, namely that I could not have written all these words about Finnish in Finnish.

My working language, as a researcher, is English. I enjoy writing in English. It's not only work but also play. Which is fortunate, too, since "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". A quote from my favourite film.

Another rhetorical question: Why "Cultivation of Intimacy"? To put it briefly, this journal intime originated when I had to put down a few marginal comments on my own Ph.D. thesis, which did not leave me alone after I had finished it (in English, indeed), entitled Counter-figures. An Essay on Antimetaphoric Resistance: Paul Celan's Poetry and Poetics at the Limits of Figurality, and I quote the expression "cultivation of intimacy" quite a few times in the dissertation, in a critical manner. Sometimes words of critique have an ambivalent potential.

Journal intime, and a personal notebook of sorts. It's a game. A game of cultivating intimacy, with the maximum exposure offered by doing it in English. A game and an offering; a game of offering. Giving darkness the light of day: journal intime.

Enough with games, enough with jokes now. Exposure of darkness, introducing words to a shadowy realm of reluctance and pathos. Ploughing the black bile of melancholy. No such thing as an interior monologue, however. A weblog, written at the coast of a half-dead sea.

Scroll down, if you will.

"Cultivation of Intimacy"

Saturday 8 August 2009

"Denn mein Herz gehört den Toten an!" (Hölderlin)

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Winter 1971-1972

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