人(_ _*)

Real poems, Celan wrote, are “making toward something   …    perhaps toward an addressable Thou.” I would argue that, for any poet writing toward such a subject, regular words and syntax soon become inadequate. Celan is an extreme case though, because he also had to contend with the inadequacy of the German language to express the experience of the Jewish poet, post-Holocaust. […]  Celan’s mother’s language was German. This German-speaking mother, who makes fitful enigmatic appearances in his poems, was shot by Germans. […]  Celan chose to protest from inside German, in “death-rattling,” “quarreling” words. Though he spoke numerous other languages (Romanian, Russian, French), and though he had written previously in Romanian, he nevertheless decided to remain in German, which he broke and reclaimed. German, for Celan, was the language that had to “pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.”

today marks the 46th anniversary of yawm el ard or land day in palestine, commemorating the general strike and protests that took place in palestinian territories, from galilee to the negev, on the 30th of march in 1976, in response to the israeli settler government’s plan to take away thousand of dunams of land from their rightful owners for state purposes. the ensuing confrontation with the occupational forces (both army and police) resulted in the killing of six unarmed palestinian civilians, about one hundred of palestinian civilians were wounded or maimed, and hundreds of others were arrested. today, we remember and honor palestinian people risking their lives to establish boldly and proudly their unwavering connection to the land they’re indigenous to. every march 30th palestinians show again and again their commitment to resistance, honoring this day by holding vigils and planting olive trees, as a part of their ongoing resistance.

In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.