Ivan Illich and Paul Celan on Death

Paul Celan and Ivan Illich both grappled with the holocaust (Shoah)

in a speech in Bremen, January 20, 1958, Paul Celan said although so much was permanently lost in the holocaust, there remained his german mother-tongue
"But it had to go through ... the thousand darknesses of death"

Illich once told Lee Hoinacki that "Celan's action was a powerful voice of intelligibility in what Illich called the horror of the technogenic milieu in which we live"

in 1992, Illich wrote: "The old have always remembered better times, but that is no excuse for us, who were alive during the regimes of Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler and Franco, to forget the farewell to the world we lived through.

I remember the day when I became old once and for all. I cannot forget the dark clouds of March in the evening sun and the vineyard on the Sommerleite between Pötzleinsdorf and Salmannsdorf near Vienna, two days before the "Anschluss". Until that hour it had been a certainty for me that some day I would give children to the old tower on the Dalmatian Island. Since that lonely walk this seemed impossible.... even before a command was issued from Berlin to gas all fools in the Reich

We, who are just old enough and yet young enough to have lived through the End of Nature, the end of a world proportionate to the senses, should be able to die like no one else.

What has been composed can decompose. The past can be re-evoked. But Paul Celan knew that only smoke remains from the world-dwindling that we have experienced. The worldliness of the world is not deposited like ruins in deeper layers of the ground. It is gone, like an erased line of the RAM drive

we shall praise God for the sensual glory of the real world through our good-bye from it."

Paul Celan jumped into the Seine in Paris, 1970; Ivan Illich lived what he preached about medical nemesis and died during a nap after a long "difficult friendship" with a mandicular tumour in 2002

www.pudel.uni-bremen.de/pdf/IllichBecker_en.pdf
www.pudel.uni-bremen.de/pdf/Hoinacki_Clar04_Philia_philia_en.pdf

Paul Celan

my favorite two quotes from Paul Celan are:

Ich bin du wenn ich ich bin (1)

and

In den Flüssen nördlich der Zukunft
werft ich das Netz aus, das du zögernd beschwerst
mit von Steinen geschriebenen Schatten.(2)

David Cayley has written a book with/for Ivan Illich called "The Rivers North of the Future" http://www.anansi.ca, the title is the first line of the english translation:

Into the Rivers North of the Future
I cast out the net, that you
hesitently burden with
stone-engraved shadows

Celan and Illich had much in common including: 
they both won prizes from the city of Bremen

"Only in the mother tongue can one speak his own truth." (3)

My favorite french translation of the above are:

"je suis toi quand je suis moi" (4)

et

Dans les fleuves au nord du futur,
je lance le filet
qu'hésitant(e) tu alourdis
d'ombres écrites par des pierres.(5)

(1) "I am thou when I am myself" or "I am you, when I am: I"
note the reference to "I am who am" in Deuteronomy
taken from "Lob Der Ferne" Mohn und Gedächtnis
(2) taken from "AtemKristalll" oct 1963
(3) www.webdelsol.com/InPosse/rakow-celan12.htm
(4) or "je suis toi quand moi suis moi"
membres.lycos.fr/toto_zero/Celan.html(5) i could only find it in google's cache