Dan Pagis was born in Bukovina, Romania, in 1930. The same region where Paul Celan came from. Like Celan, Pagis also was interred for a while in a concentration camp, from which he escaped in 1944. He eventually made his way to Israel in 1946. He learned Hebrew, and chose to write his poetry in that language. I am not as familiar with his poetry as with the poetry of his more famous contemporary Yehuda Amichai, who also wrote in Hebrew. The poems I have read seems to be more preoccupied with the Holocaust than Amichai’s work which is more identified with the birth of a nation and it’s struggle with history as it attempts to deal with the present and look to the future. As a legacy of the Holocaust, Pagis was left with a sense of the threatening  moral vacancy at the heart of existence. This world is not a moral economy, it is a physical one. At the heart of things lies no Platonic governance, or set of ultimate moral standards that exert retribution for wrongs perpetrated by evildoers. And evildoers like the Nazis count on this. They are biological reductionists. Eugenicists look to the species, and devalue the individual, whose worth is judged only insofar as they concur with the idealised template of the species. Rights accrue on a genetic basis, and to that extent are genetically determined. And thus Nazis are, in their own eyes, justified in what they do. What the horrified witness to their acts is left to deal with, however, is a challenge to their own worldview and traditionally held assumptions when just deserts are not meted out accordingly and the evildoers go about their business unimpeded. If not outright divine intervention, then surely… something…should have happened. And why does the sun still shine? The world is suddenly a changed place. Pagis explores this unmasking, in the form of an experiment, the historical analogue of which does not require comment. The final horror revealed in this poem is the biological reductionism to a simple overriding instinct to survive that serves to isolate each and every one of us. What evidence is there, that in those final moments after the door was sealed shut, those who were about to die could find within themselves the strength to show compassion and to comfort each other? Little or none, because there were no survivors to tell of it. [The enormity of the crime is thereby made worse]. What this poem hints at is this final monstrosity. And the evidence lies in the experiment, if your perspective and worldview is confined to the laboratory. Part of the burden of bearing witness is to document contrary evidence, to resist reductionist ideologies and their inferences. Pagis, of course, does this as part of the urgency of his work overall.

In The Laboratory

The data in the glass jar: some ten scorpions

of various species, a community

lazy, adjustable, moved by feelings of equality,

each treading, each trodden upon.

Now the experiment:

an inquisitive, private providence blows

poisonous fumes.

At once,

each is alone in the world,

erect on his tail, begging one moment more

from the glass wall.

The sting is superfluous now,

the pincers do not understand.

The dry straw body stiffens against the last judgement.

Distant in the dust, the angels of doom

are terrified.

But it’ s only an experiment, an experiment,

not a verdict

of poison for poison.