Each arrow you shoot off carries its own target into the decidedly secret tangle
Interpretation
The quote suggests that every action we take has a specific intention or purpose, often unknown to others.
In this quote, Paul Celan reflects on the intricate and often hidden nature of our intentions and the impact of our actions. Each 'arrow' symbolizes a directed choice or effort, with its own unique destination and significance, reminding us that our motivations and outcomes are often shrouded in mystery, both to ourselves and to others.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the importance of intentions in creative work.
With a changing key, you unlock the house where the snow of whatβs silenced drifts. Just like the blood that bursts from Your eye or mouth or ear, so your key changes. Changing your key changes the word That may drift with flakes. Just like the wind that rebuffs you, Clenched round your word is the snow.
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the βnot always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
no one bears witness for the witness
in the air, there your root remains, there, in the air
We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.
The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.
The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.
A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.
There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.
Have little care that Life is brief, And less that Art is long. Success is in the silences Though Fame is in the song.
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