THE ‘I’ OF SHAME AND RAGE: CONFESSION AND RUMINATION AT EITHER END OF A MILLENNIUM

Abstract

This article brings together two texts that differ in numerous respects: the long poem farbe komma dunkel by Levin Westermann (2021) and a devotional text often known as the Bamberg Creed and Confession (Bamberger Glaube und Beichte), transmitted in a twelfth-century manuscript. Proceeding from a parallel reading, the article consists of a series of ruminations on a prominent grammatical feature shared by the poem and the confession — the I — and on a shared emotional tone involving shame and rage in the face of failure. The article offers a collaborative response to the two texts, both of which work with lists, repetitions and citations of pre-texts as a way of articulating location and emotion. The aim is to read in such a way as to combine affective responsiveness with interpretative rigour, attuned as much to the now of reading as to the historical and critical issues the texts raise. What emerges is a demonstration of the power and pleasure of literary language despite or quite possibly because of the consciousness of its precarity and, in the case of Westermann's poem, its seeming enmeshment within ecocidal forces.