Friday Links
June 5, 2026
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St. Hildegard von Bingen (attr. Wilhelm Fassbinder, 1898
Paul Celan’s Via Negativa
The Cordial Catholic with Shemaiah Gonzalez
Tolkien and Tech
Hildegard, Tarkovsky, Citrus Trees
Cinema Paradiso and the sacrament of cinema
B. H. Fairchild ~ PoetryLA Interview Series
Paul Celan’s Via Negativa
An extraordinary essay on Celan from Patrick Brian Eha:
Martin Buber, whom Celan read closely, once remarked that the atheist gazing from his attic window “is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.” Just so, Celan took God more seriously in his agonized yearning than do millions of casual believers. Negation was his way to stay near to God while confessing to feeling godforsaken; even seeming blasphemy served to keep the name of the Most High in his mouth. In the early 1960s, around the time of “Psalm,” he taught a seminar on Christian mysticism at the École. Recovering from the Third Reich, the German cultural establishment often preferred to see in Celan’s work either poetic fantasy, “purely lexical” in nature, or gestures of reconciliation. But reconciliation to the Nazi past was never possible for the poet. He remained conflicted about his readership. “Now and again they invite me to Germany for readings. Even the anti-Semites have discovered me.”
The Cordial Catholic with Shemaiah Gonzalez
Gonzalez talks about how she encountered Catholicism at an evangelical seminary!
Tolkien and Tech
Tolkien hated automobiles because they were noisy and dirty, and he was disturbed by the triumph of speed and mass that they represented. And while others dismissed the deaths of pedestrians and motorists alike as the necessary cost of progress, Tolkien lamented them as truly avoidable tragedies. Heedless innovation was not something he treated with casual disregard. To him, cars were not simply convenient modes of transportation; they were nothing less than an oil-fueled revolution. In this story, he satirizes them as Motores, great hulking monsters of metal that poison the air, destroy the environment, and kill the human beings who have the misfortune of crossing their path. Only too late do the sages of Bovadium realize the danger of letting the Motores remake their way of life.
Hildegard, Tarkovsky, Citrus Trees
A gorgeous essay from Nicolette Polek in The Paris Review:
Tarkovsky himself was fixated on sculpting in time, his phrase for cinema’s unique capacity to preserve the texture of lived moments via the pressure of duration itself. The idea is resonant with Hildegard’s viriditas, her sense that divine life is not an abstraction but rather a quality that saturates matter and can be felt, tasted, and in Tarkovsky’s case, seen. His filmography ends how it begins—in war, in a robbed childhood, and with a slivering possibility of rebirth. Both his first and last films end with an image of a tree.
Cinema Paradiso and the sacrament of cinema
“Cinema Paradiso” presents cinema as sacrament. In his youth Toto is an indifferent altar boy, falling asleep when he’s supposed to be ringing the altar bells, but he approaches his work in the projector booth with devotion and care. You can tell that he considers himself at the service of something sacred. At the Paradiso we see people fall in love, fight, nurse babies, celebrate, mourn, laugh and even die in the seats of the theater. Going to the movies connects them to one another and to the very heart of life. The films they watch transport them to other places and times, inspire them to reach for things they never thought were possible.
B. H. Fairchild ~ PoetryLA Interview Series
An oldie but goodie from the PoetryLA Interview Series. In this one, guest B. H. Fairchild discusses his work, especially his collection Blue Buick: New and Selected Poems. He’s known for “working class lives in the small towns in Texas and Kansas where he grew up.”
