THE ANCHOR JAR
by LUTZ SEILER, TRANS. BY MARTYN CRUCEFIX
In writing, there are always those moments when you cannot make progress. Days when you pace round the room endlessly, around the material, when in actual fact you are circling yourself, repeatedly mouthing something aloud, to your ear, only to hear the same thing over and over again: it’s not right. A dervish squats on the voice and constricts it. For as long as it takes, until the utterance is right, then he grows animated, he adds his part, that ineffable something to the whole, and on both sides the feeling of gratitude is great. As great as the despair when things are not working out.
One evening, about eight years ago, when I had been similarly stymied for a while and was close to despair, I took myself down to the cellar. It may have been that I was already a bit disoriented, at any rate exhausted, like a creature that has spent too long circling an invisible prey. I explored the shelves in the semi-darkness and eventually found what I was looking for: a few empty glass jars covered in coal dust. When I had washed them off, I could see the maritime symbol they carried on the lid and the lettering of an old, comforting name: they were ANCHOR jars. Ribbed glass jars made by the Anchor company in Saxony — jars that had been used and handed down in my family for several generations. Back at my desk, I took a pair of scissors and, without a moment’s hesitation, carefully started to cut up my drafts. I cut right through verses and stanzas, seldom leaving many lines together, scissoring words or groups of words from the page. And it felt good, satisfying, productive, so I also cut up earlier manuscripts and papers that had been languishing in a drawer and I filled my Anchor jars with them. Then I sealed them up. I attached a length of adhesive tape as a label and dated the jars with the year and the season: Autumn 1996. I had preserved them.
At the time, I did not feel the least inclination to account for such a bizarre action. That only changed when I broke open my jars in the summer of 2003 and I had to ask myself: why had writing turned to preserving that evening? Why this rather helpless resort to an old, unliterary process?
Making preserves: every year there was a fruit harvest that got completely out of hand. For days on end, over-supply and stockpiling round the hearth in the steam-filled utility kitchen and, in front of it, the hurriedly gathered outlines of several familiar shapes. On the big burners stood the preserving pans, which, with thermometers protruding from their lids like antennae, looked like nothing so much as spaceships ready to launch. From my vantage point at the kitchen table, my command centre, I viewed these ships’ failure to achieve lift-off with a critical eye. It seemed perfectly possible they might explode at any moment. In what was called a “good year” there was a deluge from the garden that quite swamped us. I can still hear, “There’s too much,” or “I can’t manage this,” then a groaning from the vaulted cellar, where the filled jars were being stacked, no longer just on shelves, but along passageways and on the stone steps that led directly into the cellar from the kitchen. From the start, it seemed inconceivable that all this produce would ever be consumed. But to give up, to abandon something to decay, that was simply out of the question. On the contrary, additional jars, rubber bands and clips were hastily procured and at long last, several days later, the invasion had finally been contained and despatched into the Anchor jars of that particular vintage, examples of which, simply due to the sheer numbers, would still be turning up in the backs of cupboards decades later, the fruit covered with a thin, chalky crust that was claimed not to be mould and so no reason not to consume it. What I really felt about this I only came across later in the cellar poem, “Down There,” by W. H. Auden: “Encrust with years of clammy grime, the lair, maybe, / Of creepy-crawlies or a ghost.”
It was only in the context of her war experiences, the anxieties associated with them, that I could make much sense of my grandmother’s talk after this onslaught — and even in her exhaustion — of “the blessing of fruit that keeps on giving.” No — no such corresponding hardship had been the precursor to my writing crisis. And no, I did not consider my scribblings as “giving,” quite the contrary. Yet, even in the midst of my distress, I had impulsively turned to just this practice, from my own upbringing, with which a seemingly impossible circumstance might be managed via a mechanical process. And why should I not think of my jars as part of the storehouse of technical aids about which Edgar Allan Poe writes in his Philosophy of Composition? With the help of these jars, I had not merely set my material aside, I had transposed it in time.
A preserve retains juice and hence freshness, yet everyone knows preserves do not taste like the original fruit. Between the fruit and the jar that is later opened comes the method, the process, and — above all — time. The preserved fruit tastes of time. Today I would say that the best thing about a poem when you recite it to yourself is that it tastes of time. Working on the poem amounts to an investment of time, in the proper sense of the word. The result is the poem’s temporal power, which in turn is essential for the potency of its imagery. It is not a question of any specific verb tense: its fascination is with the passage of time. In my work on a poem, for example, this means delving into the past for the very moment, for the first stirrings of the poem, the moment of its inception. Working with this particular, non-paraphrasable moment is difficult: on the one hand, it must be preserved and, if I succeed in doing this, it will emerge, intact, in the final version as a kind of infant form of the poem. Despite all the painstaking and tiresome labour, it is precisely from this that the completed poem will draw an essential part of its power. The other requirement, as I have said, is the vertical work, revealing the layers of time within which this poem’s core is embedded, the search for the lines of its magnetic field across history, biography or technology.
Today, when I think back to the sense of pleasure that I experienced in cutting up my manuscripts, I understand things more clearly. Apart from the satisfaction that the aggressive, purely destructive aspects of this action might have yielded, there must have been a vague expectation, in the depths of my despair, that what I was doing would not only liberate the present, but also create the future. I was transposing my material into an “ideal now” in the future, a forthcoming present of wonderful writing moments that would be elicited by this material when I could re-encounter it as if new—moments of awakening, of grasping before understanding, which the poem needs in order to be a poem: in those jars lay dreams of my future writing.
Anchor jars—in some ways they seem the opposite of a message in a bottle. In 1958, on receiving the Bremen Literature Prize, Paul Celan described the poem as a message in a bottle. An Anchor jar and a message in a bottle: both are receptacles with a maritime association, yet their movements, their locations, their histories are quite different. In the case of the message in a bottle, there is a forsakenness, a sense of something having been lost on both sides, both sender and recipient are afflicted by it.
Doubts about the addressee, even about the legitimacy of contemplating an addressee, and the hope — more or less besieged by these doubts — for some specific impact resulting from the poem and its language: nowadays, it seems to me, these ideas have been absorbed into the act of writing itself, they have become an element of the self-reflection involved in the process of writing. Doubt: the author no longer needs to propose it, there is hardly any reason for him to address this difficult subject in any extra-literary way. When I write today, from the outset I can no longer assume the role of a self-evident speaker of a message destined for an audience. This is a definitive shift in the author’s disposition that has an impact not only on his methods but also on the text he writes. A message in a bottle and anAnchor jar — instead of speaking in vague terms about the “author,” perhaps I would do better to focus on the receptacles, because it is only at first sight that the differences between them predominate. With both these vessels, time is gained,time is invested. The Anchor jar, with its fragments, can then perhaps be viewed as an experiment in the deferral of the promise implied in the image of a message in a bottle on its way. Or to put it another way: as a message in a bottle, these Anchor jars were en route into my own writing. Both these vessels serve to transform the failures
of the present, by way of an old technology, into a hope for the future. And in this way, the present becomes more manageable, and the work can also proceed as, eventually, it did in my own case.
In cutting up and preserving my manuscripts (without boiling them, of course) there certainly lay my wishful thinking to return language to the status of matter, a poetic raw material, treating it, if such a thing is possible, as a kind of natural substance. At first glance, my picking up the scissors might look brutal, but I only severed structure and I did not harm a single word in the process. Today I see the whole procedure more as an act of conservation, of precaution, also in the sense of laying up stores. Yet the process of preserving does not only represent a desire for conservation and a wish to return language to substance, it also represents the wish to seek out the particular place where it may be properly accommodated.
As a child, every day after school my job was to light the stove. Stove-ash-bucket-cellar-coal-stove: that was the orbit of those afternoons. It might take me an hour to re-emerge from the cellar. There was a numbingly sweet dead-mouse smell in the air and a bluish gleam of cyanide in the corners. The cellar sent me into dream states, states of ease and complete absence. Almost motionless, I stood with a candle in my hand (the electric light was broken) and cast its light over the shelves, or better to say I eavesdropped on them. Behind me on the wall hung the huge baseboard of a model railway, beside me my great-grandmother’s old armoire, but before me were arrayed rows of preserves, a collection of museum proportions. Reading the jars, I made out the neatly inscribed adhesive tape, my mother’s handwriting, or my grandmother’s, occasionally an unfamiliar hand with dates that, to my childish imagination, referred to an inconceivably distant past.
Perhaps this was my first reading in the passage of time. There was a silence that seemed to emanate from those dusty jars and to which I responded with a kind of muttering, something vocalised, a conversation with myself. A kind of primal scene, perhaps, in the story of one’s own voice. The mute presence of these preserves, their organic immobility, stirred something in me, stirred me to inchoate sounds. At least it did until I reached the lower shelves with my candlelight, my reading light. There sat the jars containing meat and sausage, the archives of liver, blood and fat. Every year, on my grandfather’s farm, we still slaughtered our own livestock. The slaughter party meant: the child gripping the drumming limbs of the staked, panicking animal as the butcher applied the bolt gun to its head. Or: the child being asked to come hold the animal’s intestines while they are rinsed over the sink, the child vomiting. He gets poured his first vodka, which he flings behind him, against the laundry-room wall. So, there are things to smile about and, by way of consolation, one half of the much-coveted brain, which is said to have miraculous powers, and its little oily mass is already sizzling in the pan. Every year a slaughter day, every year new jars of black pudding, liver sausage, minced meat — for my entire childhood and youth, this is what filled my sandwiches. Home-butchered meats were precious and highly prized, but my problem with them was the lack of variety — though nothing as bad as Woyzeck’s bean diet, of course. If you are what you eat, as we used to say, if I believed in this morphological short circuitry, then every time I went to fetch the coal, did I not have to fight off the thought, standing in front of those shelves, that I was staring into my own future, indeed catching a glimpse of myself in those jars? Driven by my writing crisis, I had clearly been determined to overcome the considerable levels of physical disgust that contemplating such preserves tended to produce in me. To see myself, not only provisioned with these jars, but also prepared, in the true sense of the word, I mean, to find myself in what was yet to come, that remained the crucial experience.
Everything is connected: an understanding of passing through time and of the power of time in the poem. A message in a bottle, an Anchor jar—vessels for the extraction of time. The desire for a substance-like state of language and, eventually, a place for its accommodation, its contemplation, ultimately a place for the creation of the poem, grounded, hushed, filled with absence. And when I look through my notebooks of this period, it becomes clear that my obsession with preserving as a literary technique went hand in hand with the discovery of material from my childhood, that is, the actual time of such preserving, of archiving moments that later appear timeless in the poem. In this sense, the point at which I got blocked on that particular occasion, and at which I turned to scissors and cutting, marked a moment of change, a reorientation in my own writing.
So, at last, back to the jars. There were times when I picked them up and shook them; I could make out individual words through the ribbed glass. But mostly the jars just stood alongside notebooks; more recently they were hidden behind books on a shelf. Something happened over time. My writing had finally moved on and the promise that was preserved in those jars, or that I had taken to be in them, now seemed dubious. Sure, I had thought about it on occasion, but I had always refrained from opening the jars. Imperceptibly, their meaning had changed before my eyes. I had to admit to myself that now, instead of a promise, I sensed a kind of threat: vessels in which nothing more nor less than an old writing crisis had been preserved. Something to be kept locked away at all costs; at best, to be thought of as a symbol of coping with it. But as so often happens, curiosity and recklessness won the day and, seven years later, I opened the jars, though I first took the precaution of packing their contents, sight unseen, into several envelopes and stowing them in my luggage on my way to Los Angeles, where I was to spend the summer. To be honest, the outcome was oddly sobering. Beside a window that looked out across Santa Monica Bay, among the scattered bits of paper on my desk, there was, with hardly any exceptions, nothing that had been forgotten. Over the course of the previous few years, almost every word, every connection, had been incorporated, in one way or another, into my poems. I had preserved; I had set aside, yet nothing had been lost to the writing, nothing had been lacking, nothing but time. In the Anchor jars, everything had taken its time: the words had taken their time till their text had emerged and I too had taken the time to find a belief in myself and in this voice.
author pic here
Poet, novelist and essayist Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin, and in Stockholm. His writing has won many prizes, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, the Ingeborg Bachmann and the German Book Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. For the body of his work, he was awarded the 2023 Georg Büchner Prize, whose past recipients include Max Frisch, Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.
Martyn Crucefix is a poet and translator. His translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies was shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation, while These Numbered Days, translations of poems by Peter Huchel, won the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize. His most recent translation, of the poetry of Jürgen Becker, came about after discovering Becker in an essay he translated in Lutz Seiler’s non-fiction collection In Case of Loss (published by And Other Stories), from which “The Anchor Jar” is taken.
Next ( ENLIGHTENMENTS 1) >
< Previous ( Ileana Garma, trans. by Allison A. DeFreese)