MERIDIAN

--second largest city in the state of Mississippi

 "Please note, ladies and gentlemen: 'One would like to be a Medusa's head' to . . . seize the natural by means of art!

One would like to, by the way, not: I would!

This means going beyond what is human, stepping into a realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny -- the realm where the monkey, the automatons and with them . . . oh art, too, seem to be at home.

[....]

Can we perhaps now locate strangeness, the place where the person was able to set himself free as an -- estranged -- I? Can we locate this place, this step?

[....]

'...only, it sometimes bothered him that he could not walk on his head.'

A man who walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, a man who walks on his head sees the sky below, as an abyss.

[....]

I find something as immaterial as language, yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of a circle which, via both poles, rejoins itself and on the way serenely crosses even the tropics: I find . . . a meridian."

Paul Celan, from The Meridian