Vesper No. 7 | Sky | Fall-Winter 2022
Massimo Palma
Lenz and
Lesabéndio. Design Against the Sky in Scheerbart and Celan
Keywords
Abyss, glass, poetry, project, collective
‘He only
disliked not having the chance to walk upside down’.
In his Meridian speech
(1960), Paul Celan comments a page in Georg Büchner’s Lenz. He
says: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the one who walks upside down, he has the
sky as an abyss below him’. Celan revindicates the poetical – and
its obscurity – as an abyssal space where the poet stands ‘heading
towards a meeting, which is made possible from a distance or an obscurity [he]
maybe intended to plan’.
Forty years before
Celan, Paul Scheerbart, the theorist of glass architecture, wrote an
‘asteroidal-novel’, illustrated by Alfred Kubin: Lesabéndio
(1913) was the fantastic story of bizarre celestial people who wanted to unify
the top and the bottom of the asteroid he lived in.
The contribution
investigates the political dimension of this ‘anti-celestial
project’ of two German-speaking authors, who look for the building
materials on Earth while the sky is known as an abyss – the major frame
of any human economy.
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