Living and Writing in Ambiguity [by Janet R. Kirchheimer]

My father hangs upside down on a pipe that separates our street from the next. All of his change falls from his pockets. I am eight years old. The kids in the neighborhood have fathers in their late twenties, and mine is in his early forties. He waves to me. He looks so young. 

From an early age I knew we were different, outsiders. Not only was he the oldest father on the street, we were the only Jewish family, my parents the only immigrants, the only Holocaust survivors. Maybe this was good training for being a poet. Or maybe it was my love of reading, escaping into the words and worlds of others, my shyness, or just the way I came into the world.

My poetic journey started when I was eight and wrote my first poem about love, and then it took a detour for many years. In my teens, I wanted to be a short story or essay writer, to write about the Holocaust. In my twenties, I worked for General Electric. In my thirties, I felt a strong desire to write again and signed up for a creative writing class with Elizabeth Ayres at NYU. In one class, she gave an assignment to write about a door and a woman. The student next to me wrote for what seemed like an hour and could have started a novel. I wrote that the woman went through the door.  She came out on the other side.  Elizabeth said I should try poetry. About four months later, I was in a workshop with Mary Stewart Hammond. 

Eliza Griswold in an interview in Poets and Writers in 2007 said, “What poetry allows for is dealing with ambiguity, which is impossible to deal with in a nonfiction article. Or, at least, I haven’t figured out how to do it yet. There are paradoxes that are essential to understand what’s going on. There are experiences that there’s no other language for, no other place for.” Ambiguity, according to one definition, is an attribute of any concept, idea, statement or claim whose meaning, intention or interpretation cannot be definitively resolved according to a rule or process consisting of a finite number of steps. Another: ambiguity is something that does not have a single, clear meaning.

The Holocaust and its aftereffects can in no way be resolved according to a rule or process, and it never can have a single meaning. When I first started writing, I thought fiction or essay would be the best way to write about the Shoah. But I couldn’t make up details, and in essay I couldn’t find a way to write what I wanted to say. Once I was in a poetry workshop, I realized I needed to write my truth. Poetry was the only way I could write about the Shoah and my family. 

For all the stories I have heard from my parents, I always knew much could never be spoken. Poetry was the way to bridge the chasm between that which could be spoken and that which could not. Learning the craft of poetry – the music of the line, the word choice and their connotation(s), the breath, line and stanza breaks, and so much more – allowed me to write about the maze of twists and turns that is the Holocaust. 

Theodor Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society and for writing: To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

From  Mindful Pleasures: A literary blog by Brian A. Oard, he writes, “ The original quote (always taken out of context and rarely footnoted) occurs in the concluding passage of a typically densely argued 1949 essay, "Cultural Criticism and Society," reprinted as the first essay in Prisms. Here is the entire passage, from the English translation by Samuel and Shierry Weber: The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation. (Prisms, 34) 

This is a harsh, devastating idea, and Adorno eventually came to consider it something of an overstatement. In his late work Negative Dialectics he offers this conditional revision--a revision that is, in its own way, perhaps even more devastating than the final paragraph of "Cultural Criticism and Society." I quote from the English translation by E. B. Ashton:  Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier. (Negative Dialectics, 362-363)

Adorno wrote Negative Dialectics. Keats about negative capability: “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I take Adorno seriously. Yes, culture and barbarism can go hand in hand, but I have deep faith that poetry is capable of influencing culture for the better. 

I believe we need to write about Auschwitz and all its implications for the living, as well as for the dead.  Survivors began new lives. Their lives were not easy. Many felt guilty for surviving. The living had dreams and nightmares about the dead. That is what I write about. Survivors tried to shelter their children from their pain. They did not succeed. They had joy, tinged by sadness. They loved. They lived. They died. That, too, is what I write about. I think that poetry after the Holocaust is necessary. It can be holy. 

Comments

[Lisa Vihos]

Janet,
This is such a beautiful essay. Thank you. I have been thinking so much about why in the heck do I write poetry when there are such terrible things going on in the world right now (where shall we start? Gaza, the children at the U.S. border, the people starving and roasting on top of the mountain, the children in my own town who have nothing to eat this morning, the wives who are battered by husbands who were battered by their fathers, and them by their fathers...)The list of suffering is endless. I often worry that my notion that poetry can make a difference is so naive. And yet, poets have, in some instances, in some places, been silenced. Surely this indicates that there is strength in speaking the truth, and as you so aptly describe, poetry can speak the truth in a way that an essay or story often cannot. A well-crafted, surprising poem can do what a longer essay cannot do: it can grab the reader's attention, and in short order, bring a flash of awareness. That said, I am so glad I took a few minutes to read your essay this morning on the blog. Thank you for writing it. Onward with poetry everywhere...
Lisa

[Janet R. Kirchheimer]

Thank you so much Lisa for your kind words about my essay. There is so much going on in the world now and as you said, the list of suffering is endless. Poetry is important. I was thinking today about "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus. Her poem has made such a difference. And yes, poetry can speak the truth. Go poetry!

Janet R. Kirchheimer

[Dave Hinchliffe]

Janet--I've been learning a great deal lately, through readings, about memory. One salient point is that without our memories we cannot have a full identity. It's as if we need, as humans, to know all of our memory; then to accept it and ourselves as we find ourselves. This seems the way to freedom. For, if the memory is in the body and we do not know it, it is possible that it can destroy us. I have personal experience with this through childhood mistreatment and the subsequent 'pushing away' of such memory for decades. Now, in part through poetic expression, I remember and reshape how I view my earlier life and my 'self'. There is little that is as sweet as living with a high degree of truth and authenticity. This sweetness can overcome, I believe, the pain and suffering one bears even from physical, emotional and sexual abuses. Thank you for your self and your poetry--you are an inspiration to me. Keep on being you--you are doing it so well.

[Janet R. Kirchheimer]

Dave,

Thank you so your kind comments. You are correct - "without our memories we cannot have a full identity." I am honored that I am an inspiration to you. It means so much to me. May we keep discovering our selves (I believe we have more than one), and may we continue to live in truth and authenticity.