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
Good directors don't answer questions with their work. They generate debate and create discussion.
Yves Saint Laurent is a young man of excellent taste; the more he copies me the more taste he displays.
I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
The strange dilemma of the 'ethnic-fiction' writer is that you are supposed to carry a banner for your homeland, be a voice for it, and educate the rest of the world about it, but I think that's far too onerous a burden for any writer to bear.
In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.
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