Untitled (Threadsuns)
Untitled (Threadsuns), 2005, embroidery on 105 crochet bordered cotton hankerchiefs, printed book (Celan, Paul, Fadensonnen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968, first edition), 72 in x 336 in
Having produced earlier drawings based on poems by Emily Dickinson and Allen Ginsberg, I became convinced that I should also make work from the writing of the Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan. I felt a similar strong connection to his voice and was amazed to find that Celan was known as a translator of Dickinson’s poetry into German. Ginsberg made a final connection here, rounding out a triangle of sources. In Kaddish he describes “…Emily Dickinson’s horses — headed to the End/They know the way — These Steeds — run faster than we think — it’s our own life they cross — and take with them.”
In 1968 Paul Celan, who as a teenager survived Nazi work camps and the post-war confirmations of countless atrocities, published the bleak late collection Faddensonnen or Fathomsuns, a collection of 105 poems written in German which measure the depths he still inhabited twenty-three years after the end of the Second World War (see Pierre Joris's introduction to his English translation Threadsuns, Sun & Moon Press, 2000, from which I borrowed my subtitle). Over the course of his life’s work but culminating in his last three volumes Celan’s lines becomes shorter, occasionally consisting of a single syllable. The poems become more difficult to read as their density and brevity coincide but he continues to write and publish until his death by suicide in 1970. At the end, absolute silence.
In working with these poems I discovered that I could make a drawing to stand in for each one by linking the end points of the written lines. Each poem’s jagged measure is like a fingerprint, is uniquely Celan’s, but I also use his work as a substrate for my own concerns. I am fascinated by the possibility of the simultaneous presence of speech and silence. It is a truism about music that the silences can be just as important as the notes. I have often tried to use silence as a literal subject and have been further engaged by the idea of a silence chosen.
In sewing this piece the laborious wrapping of drawn lines became a meditation. Gray is the predominant color of Celan’s late work and gray is the embroidered color but for the underlying fabric I collected 105 colorful handkerchiefs each with a unique crocheted border. The implicit anonymity of the handiwork and the bright colors stand as a foil to both Celan’s tendency toward bleakness and my own reductive approach. The resulting piece maps the shape and rhythms of the poems and pauses of Faddensonnen, the intakes of breath between one brief proposition and another.
A copy of the first published edition of Faddensonnen, in German, is included in the installation.
