We have already had converse with it, we recall, with this result: the closing line, "Where word breaks off no thing may be," points to the relation of word and thing in this manner, that the word itself is the relation, by holding everything forth into being, and there upholding it. If the word did not have this bearing, the whole of things, the "world," would sink into obscurity, including the "I" of the poem, him who brings to his country's strand, to the source of names, all the wonders and dreams he encounters.
In order that we may hear the voice of Stefan George's poetic experience with the word once more in another key, I shall in dosing read Gottfried Benn's two-stanza poem.* The tone of the poem is tauter and at the same time more vehement, because it is abandoned and at the same time resolved in the extreme. The poem's title is a characteristic and presumably intentional variation:
A Word
A word, a phrase—: from cyphers rise
Life recognized, a sudden sense.
The sun stands still, mute are the skies,
And all compacts it, stark and dense.
A word—a gleam, a flight, a spark,
A thrust of flames, a stellar trace—
And then again—immense—the dark
Round world and I in empty space.
These three lectures are intended to bring us face to face with a possibility of undergoing an experience with language. To experience something means to attain it along the way, by going on a way. To undergo an experience with something means that this something, which we reach along the way in order to attain it, itself pertains to us, meets and makes its
* The translation, by Richard Exner. is taken from Gottfried Benn, Primal Vision, edited by E. D. Ashton, p. 251. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. (Tr.)