Lamentations in poetry: The eloquent pain

As a biblical lamentation, dirge, lamentation or elegy, lamentation is an important part of literary history. The lyrics, which arise from illness, pain, violence, destruction and loss, do not seek out the suffering from which they arose, but seek an artistic form for it. Asmus Trautsch and Melanie Katz have conceived a two-day event on the subject for the Berlin Literature Forum in the Brechthaus, which should do justice to as many aspects as possible. At the opening, the writer Ulrike Draesner will give a speech, from which we will document an excerpt.

Complaint is eloquent. i hear voices a choir. Formalized speaking. I hear words like “charge” and “location”. Anyone who speaks of the latter has an overview. He/she judges the situation – the arrangement of bodies and things. Stands outside.

The lament contains both: inside and outside. Immersion and – reflection. She is soft and loud. Focused on something absent (that which is lost or that which is missing) and on something present: those who hear. Also: those who suffer or are supposed to judge. She complains that nothing can be fixed (the dead man will not return) – and demands just that. She represents pain, IS pain, and exhibits it. She lives from the tension between content and performance. She is never “only” with herself, never “pure” or “immediate”. What she laments inwardly cannot be said inwardly, only imitated.

The heart of the lament appears in the lament. It resonates: lacrima. Lacrimae, the tears, are the lamentations of the body. Uneloquent (nonverbal) eloquent.

A complaint just as a word quickly degenerates into a transport vessel for other concerns that are hidden in the cloak of the complaint. Gives me … money, success, pity, etc. For example in Minnesang, in which the singer laments the role of the happy not to be heard, so that he may be heard, which is itself still only a game, for in fact he laments so that one may admire how excellently he can lament.

In other words: in a lament that I can believe – that should be allowed to touch me, the body has a say.

Maybe that’s why I don’t think of a legal process or a poem when I sue. I am thinking of a physical process, of making a sound. It doesn’t have to be done individually. In other words: it can definitely be public. But it is not normal or everyday language. Not well-formed. It’s about somatic expression – between speaking and sound of pain. Phonetic: This sharp-soft, sensitive point of articulation. The first form-giving, translating a state – of being struck, of being afflicted with “a situation” in response – as a bodily reaction that also invokes a sound.

Near the teardrop.

The ball of the hands.

The numbness in the abdomen or elsewhere.

But: With breath and vocal cords.

Which, soma-semantically, means: that I breathe out. that something is leaving me

Which precisely describes a first paradox of lamentation: I let something go. It relieves me, for one thing; but at the same time it confirms/deepens the loss.

And the second paradox: Are complaints vessels? As a vessel, a lament could contain my pain and – take it away. Maybe that’s what one wishes for. But: a lamentation is not a vessel: pain cannot be contained. Not like the fruit bowl contains strawberries.

The lawsuit is subversive. I don’t use her, she uses me. My pain, my loss are her vessel. Vessels are hollow shapes: they have outlines, edges – and emptiness. My pain is a disturbing vessel placed in me, which jams in me and in whose emptiness the lament is formed, from which it can escape.

Because of these two paradoxes – sounding between semantics and somatics, reversal of agency when dealing with emptiness, poetry is THE form of lamentation. Poetry can be micro-macro at the same time, the biggest and the smallest, the I and everyone. Poetry hugs. Poetry thrives on gaps and emptiness.

Perhaps understanding poetry as a consolation from distress is just my taste. When do I seek poetry? When do I need it, where does it speak to me most vitally? Her consolation is not cheap, if it deserves the name of poetry. It is a consolation from speaking itself – from not being silent. A consolation that does not calm the content, does not cover anything, sweetens nothing. A consolation, BECAUSE this speaking itself is disturbed – because the disturbance, which is the loss, which is the ground and reason and the pouring out of my lamentation, has left its mark on him. So it is a speaking that I can feel as being particularly truthful – for this inner non-speech state, as reflecting it.

A lament that mourns and lives. Wanting to die and proof of defiance is: I’m still stirring. Lamentation: gifted with the Next (the plague gift) of vocalizing.

The loss has broken me. A me-before, a me-after. Out of this split I speak as I that speaks where I-other-I am silent (silent again and again)