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
When people ask what 'American Pie' is about, they're missing the point. The song isn't about the lines themselves - it's about what is between the lines. The song is about what isn't there.
There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.
I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway.
Writers are only rarely likable.
An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God.
I'm just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.
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