Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 17 Number 1, April 2016
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Damian, Theodor. Ein Fallen selbst im Steigen. Gedichte. POP Verlag, Ludwigsburg, 2015, 87 p.
Reviewed by
University of Delaware
The true adventure of creative writing, in its highest dimension, becomes a language within a language, as Paul Valery says; it becomes the entry to the road that leads to the Tree of Life, according to the New Testament, where poetry, as twisting sword and as a Cherub, guards the secret road of the initiated, and of all who taste of the speaking water, the living water, the water leaping up to eternal life, the immortal water of Tradition. Theodor Damian’s poetry reflects such existential experience of unconditional love and open borders. His approach provides sensitive and timely imaginations and attempts to break away from the traditional choices.
As for the idea of nature, the poet, truly a theologian and thinker in depth, here as elsewhere in his poetry uses the sense of close, communion between man and nature (a sense which to the Romantics had been theoretically as natural as breath itself) as a symbol of an innocence now lost and irrecoveracible: es schmilzt das Eis in dem wir eingeschlossen/es taut das Wort im Herzen/und Gott taut in dem Wort. (p. 9)
What Damian does with the flux of time is to arrest it, investing an isolated moment of experience with self-justifying and purely human satisfactions. From these ephemeral but crystallized pleasures he then stands back, with an air of detached irony, like an adult half-amused, half-sympathetic like a child: mit den Schuhen im Schaufenster und mit/dem Schaufenster in den Schuhen (…) alles ist Strippenziehen/die einen sind kuerzer/die anderen laenger (…) manchmal siehst du Dinge wegen der Strippen nicht mehr. (p. 22) Such images expand into concrete and elaborate symbols of human restlessness, or satiety, or anger. Like Lamb he would fain lay an ineffectual finger on the spoke of Time’s great wheel. A very characteristic lyric for this collection is “Ich regne und schreibe”, in which the author exhorts the seasons to delay: An jedem Tag dreht sich der Himmel/im Meon/ich regne und schreibe/und Tau faellt auf die Wolle des Gideon. (p. 59)
When I read this poems one evening after Christmas and before New Year Eve to some visitors, one of my Greek friends explored the context: It is about the true Platonic anamnesis which is earned with Socrates’ conium and Phaedrus’ four sacred manias: the prophetic one of Apollo, the ceremonial one of Dionysus, the erotic one of Aphrodite and Eros, and the divinely inspired on of the Muses.
In meinem Tropfen sind viele Wasser/
Und wenn sie ruhig liegen/
Kommt jener Wind vom Akazienwald/
Und macht sie schneller/
Eins von dem anderen gefolgt/
So wie man die Blaetter betaetigt/
Wie irre/
Damit sich dreht ein Propeller. (p. 54)
The bottom line of the poet’s conscience is that love isn’t a feeling. Instead it is deliberate action taken by us toward God and toward others. God’s love in us by its nature is outward, out-flowing, away from immediate self-interest. It does not seek its own” (1 Corinthians 13:5). Yet in loving outwardly we ourselves are also blessed. Poesy is, in Damian’s vision, the Gospel in eternity, which means, in Heaven and on earth and in the world, but not of this world, the eternal New Testament in the Highest, the perpetual eradication of the ego and the humble recognition of the souls, of the inner self, who is, at once, demolisher and constructor. The poet is the spiritual hermit and ascetic of God, as Rilke says.
God’s ways are not theory, but the keys to life. There’s an old Asian proverb that states, “I see and I forget, I hear and I remember, but I do and I understand.” There is not much poetry today like Damian’s - so completely devoted to a lively and informed mind. As he describes attitudes, mental and natural phenomena the reader becomes aware of his own sensibility and potential. Through the “emotional memory” of the reader the poems offer “case studies” unexpected, surprising, full of directness…
Isn’t that what God implores us to consider in James 1:33-“ But be doers of the word, and not hearers only…”? This poems reconfirm us: Life is in the doing! The reader may wonder: What’s holding you back from your love affair with God? Are you afraid, bewildered, confused? Any spiritual recovery towards regaining our “first love” lies on the other side of the panic that “you feel.” The poems deal with all of this with a directness that rises to eloquence. They denote and affirm a poetry beyond and higher than psychologisms and neuroses, subjectivity, arbitrariness and offensive egopathy. The great gives birth to the great and the small gives birth to the small. This is a necessity of physiology. But the mystery remains. Why should an ant exist? Why should a leaf of the tree-man live out its measured years? What universal destiny directs things? Damians poems do not need answers to this questions. They are part of an important tendency in modern poetic diction: to make dramatic use of natural, unself-conscious language drawn from ordinary modern speech.
This is not wholly an innovation, since of course Byron and Browning practiced it in the nineteenth century and Pope in the eighteenth; and an other great poet, a contemporary from the thwenteeth century, Elytis, too wonders: “Who is to console me for having been born?” In such a negation, in such a “no”, his sole antidote, solace and consolation, is the poetic logos that exorcises and heals, a pharmakon for immortality and topography of the soul, beauty’s salvation, sacred garment and cast of God.