Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

If the Supreme Being is in each of us, then He has passed away too, for the Supreme Being — by dint of the ovens in which he burned his sons and daughters, by dint of the complete combustion, of which only the ash preserves the memory — is incinerated too. Did he die with every one of them and in every one of them, or has he survived, ruined, with every one of us, in every one of us? — and consequently, in I (Klein) and in Thou (Gross).

These two speak, one to the other, and sometimes to the staff that knows them of old and accompanies them even in their postmortem ascent. Might the staff be a book? These two exiles are poets, and even if they were prophets or priests, the book would still be a reliable staff. The book, like the staff, aids in any ascent and not only listens, like the staff, but even converses.

I do not know if the two exiles of posterity carry some book with them through the winding curves that lead one toward the other, as I am tempted to suppose. I do not know because we are not told. It would not be at all out of the question, but we do know, in any event, that we are not told everything. It would not be out of the question … no, it would even be probable for them each to have a book, be it visible or hidden. It is certain that they carry a book in themselves, and more — written by them, themselves, and by the other and by the others.

And without doubt they hold Buber’s work inside themselves, in the form of his book, I and Thou , a volume the size of a pocketbook, known to both. It would be suitable, and not just for this reason. Definitively, this work also embodied the meeting and conversation on the mountain between I and Thou. Not at all by chance, it was and is most precisely an emblem of Judaic thought and feeling.

Sh’ma Yisrael! the sacred Hebrew prayer is an address: Hear, O Israel!

It is an appeal from I to Thou, before being an appeal from I to You (plural). Sh’ma Yis’ra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad! Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One! — the Lord is the only God.

The refrain, often repeated, in Conversation in the Mountains —“You hear me? Do you hear me? … It is I” seems an echo of the sacred invocation, emptied of the sacred after the burning.

The Supreme Recipient of Our Addresses — muffled in time and as a consequence of the total combustion — survives, though, as long as He claims to be the like of us and we of Him. He too survives after death. Did God die at Auschwitz? There existing no resort “more supreme” than the Supreme, God cannot die except as a result of His own decisions and actions, through self-negation, self-demolition, and abandon: by suicide, by Himself dispossessed of immortality, and dispossessed through his own lack of power, of sacredness. He who has lived All Things and All Times would have to live this too, in the image of and likeness unto mortals, as one of them. Powerless to stop evil, did he commit suicide in each of the slain? Yet he would rise, too, in each survivor, become mortal in every new generation, in the cycle of the ephemerals, brief as mayflies, the final solution to which He has yet to bestow upon us.

“The personalization, the personification, the embodiment: I cannot, naturally, describe the nature of God,” Buber warns us, but “it is permitted and necessary to say that God is, likewise, a person.” Thus, “the Other” too is himself “another.”

The need to address also contains the aspiration to address the unrepresentable, unpersonifiable divinity existing, nevertheless, in I and Thou, as in the potentiality of the absent semblable and in all that surrounds us, visibly and invisibly. The implacable authority has lost his authority at Auschwitz and in so many other sinister celebrations of death; dying with each of the martyrs, He has risen with each of the survivors, in this way becoming, like them, the mortal unworthy of immortality, in solidarity, finally, with all, like Him and like them, wandering with them in valley and mountain, and beyond valleys and mountains.

The dialogue in the mountains and beyond the mountains aspires to a greater resonance than it would have as simply the response of alterities. The poets speak to each other — one to the other — the one recently dead and the other long dead, just as Klein and Gross speak, those two yet alive, uncertain if one is heard by the other but addressing each other, and , perhaps before everything else, addressing themselves to the sacred Thou, which — post burning — has become profane.

“Man has addressed himself to his eternal Thou in many ways. But all the namings of God remain sacrosanct because human beings speak not only about God but also to God,” Buber writes. He asks himself how the “eternal Thou” might be able to be “inclusive and exclusive” at the same time. How would it be possible, with no deviation, for the “unconditioned” relationship with God to include all man’s other I — Thou relations and for them to lead to God?

God is not put into question, Buber answers, but the relationship with God: for this reason we cannot avoid speaking about “the wholly other” but also about “the wholly same.” It would be mysterium tremendum that overwhelms us, but also the enigmatic immediate evidence, the proximity “closer to me than my own I.”

The Other is God, who is in the other, as He is in me.

The transcendence of mysterium tremendum no longer resides in the heaven found beyond the heaven of belief but rather in the diurnal and nocturnal Word of Poetry, where the unknown, unfulfilled, and terrestrial ineffable has taken refuge. The need to address the other is the need to address me myself and, by way of me, the other in myself, and possibly an invisible eternal Authority that once dwelt in the other and that may yet persist.

Shall we understand in this sense the democratic “I” of the English language that includes the socially high and low and all the cardinal points in an imperial equalization of ephemeral beings and of the nevertheless proud affirmation of self? This is an earthly “I,” imperial and imperious, but not sacred.

“How beautiful and legitimate the animated and empathic I of Socrates sounds,” writes Buber. “An infinite conversation, the conversational air is everywhere present, even before the judges, and even in the last hour of imprisonment.” And, Buber repeats, in the case of Jesus; “how powerful, even overwhelming is Jesus uttering I and how legitimate, up to the point of being barely a murmur, of course. An I of unconditional relations in which man summons his Thou and calls it ‘Father’ in a way that makes it nothing other than a son.”

“In the mists of posterity beyond the mountains, the post-mortem murmur of the two wandering poets does not cease searching, even after death, for the one addressed , the interlocutor, the confirmation of self. I wish for a Thou to become,” Buber instructs his exiles: “Becoming I, I say Thou. Real life is meeting.” And the life of posterity, naturally.

The conversation in the mountains follows the meeting in the mountains. The addressing of the self by way of alterity is all that has remained of the mortal abandoned by the Divinity that has, in turn, abandoned itself, and taken refuge, like these souls, in imperfection, in the too-human humanness of humanity. The poet craved and still craves to invoke the fore-life and the afterlife of the word in this way.

Posterity does not exist outside the meeting of like and unlike— semblable and its opposite — or outside of the act of addressing: I having become Thou.

Neither life nor Poetry exists, outside the meeting .