Phenomenological Comparison: Pursuing Husserl’s “Time-consciousness” in Poems by Wang Wei, Paul Celan and Santoka Taneda

ABSTRACT “Time-consciousness” (Zeitbewusstsein) constitutes the core of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Extending from a project of reviving the comparative method, we develop Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of time as a method of literary comparison. Three views of time set the stage: the quatrain “Luán’s Fall” (⟪欒家瀨⟫) by the eighth-century Chinese poet Wang Wei, a stanza from the poem “Etched off” (Weggebeizt) by Paul Celan, the quintessential post-war poet in German language, and the haiku “Walking, on and on” (歩きつづける…) by the Japanese itinerant monk and free-verse haiku pioneer Santoka Taneda. What makes these poems relevant is not merely their superficially shared theme of time, but an intrinsic affinity, manifested in different poetic “time-objects” (Zeitobjekte), to the very notion of time-consciousness. Through poetic analysis in the context of Husserl’s philosophy of time-consciousness, these poetic experiences, embodied in a phenomenological concept of “walking,” emphasize time as being.

In developing a phenomenological method of literary comparison, it is appropriate to clarify our premises, built on the phenomenology pioneered by Edmund Husserl. Indeed, working with text, poems, and images means first and foremost to recognize the arising phenomena. Since the ontological status of the phenomenon is self-evident, the epoché that Husserl calls for in the consideration of phenomenon is already implied in our subject matter: analysis of text. Thus we may proceed directly to the core of the phenomenon, its constitution in the encounter of the self with an idea, image or perception, as evidenced in the experience of time-consciousness; we illustrate and develop this view on time-consciousness through three poems. unbounded succession of instantaneous moments. The connection between these two different essences of time, however, is a long-standing, unresolved philosophical puzzle; St. Augustine exclaimed: si nemo a me quaerat, scio, si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio. 1 Time is just as self-evident as it is inaccessible: the experience of self is situated in a now that is immediately lost in the act of reflection. This is what Edmund Husserl's phenomenological analysis of time consciousness brought into vivid focus: the paradox of "an appearance of a not-now in a now" (eine Erscheinung eines Nicht-Jetzt im Jetzt); or, as Outi Pasanen paraphrases: The now can only be a now by already being another now, like a wave folding over on to the next has, in order to be a wave, already included another in itself. The self-identical, the same, can only be the same by being the other. (Pasanen 2006, 226) For Husserl, such paradoxical combination between the now and the not-now, between the self and the other, opens a window to the immanent time-consciousness that is not commensurate with any external or physical standard.

What is the phenomenal now? -Urimpression and Modifikation
In Appendix I of his 1905 lecture cycle The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Zur Phänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins), Husserl develops the structure of the phenomenon time as an ordered stream of "primal impressions" (Urimpression), constituting time-objectsof which much more is to be said belowthat undergo subsequent "modification" [Modifikation].
Die Urimpression ist der absolute Anfang dieser Erzeugung, der Urquell, das, woraus alles andere stetig sich erzeugt. Sie selber aber wird nicht erzeugt, sie entsteht nicht als Erzeugtes, sondern durch genesis spontanea, sie ist Urzeugung. Sie erwächst nicht (sie hat keinen Keim), sie ist Urschöpfung. 2 (Husserl 1966, 100) This "absolute beginning" is the origin of a time-object (in the mathematical sense: Nullpunkt); it is Husserl's reference point for the now, the instance of coming-into-being of a phenomenon which is induced, perhaps by sensation or perception (Urimpression), perhaps by memory (Ur-Erinnerung), perhaps by imagination (Ur-Phantasie) (Husserl 1966, 101). This moment of constitution is not making or fabricating, but "a process that allows for manifestation and signification, that is, it must be understood as a process that permits that which is constituted to appear, unfold, articulate, and show itself as what it is" (Zahavi 2003, 73).
This present (Gegenwart) has extent. Indeed, present expresses the immanent duration of consciousness that is essential for "time-objects" (Zeitobjekte), as Husserl emphasizes: "We take time-objects in the special sense to be objects, which are not only units in time, but also in themselves contain the extensive aspect of time." (Unter Zeitobjekten im speziellen Sinn verstehen wir Objekte, die nicht nur Einheiten in der Zeit sind, sondern die Zeitextension auch in sich enthalten) (Husserl 1966, 23). This immanent duration is constituted through "primary memory" or retention of time-objects. The "now-phase" does not possess its own identity, but is "only thinkable as a limit of the continuity of retention." (Und die Jetztphase ist nur denkbar als Grenze einer Kontinuität von Retentionen) (Husserl 1966, 33). Husserl's time objects therefore are allowed a certain extent within the time horizon, realized through retention (and its future conjugate, protention), 3 in relationships the time-objects take up with others and the conscious self.
The "primal moment," Ursprungsmoment, 4 marks the now, and primal moments are intrinsically connected through their relationships, which in turn correspond to an actualized now: Jedes Ursprungsmoment hilft eine konkrete Dauer konstitutieren und zur Konstitution einer konkreten Dauer gehört es, daß jedem Punkt derselben ein aktuelles Jetzt entspricht, das seinerseits zu seiner Konstitution ein aktuelles Ursprungsmoment erfordert. 5 (Husserl 1966, 101) However, a time-object, even if bestowed duration, is not yet time, and we find it helpful to interpret Husserl's mental model in a somewhat different framework. Crucially, the timeobjects themselves are not static but undergo modification: Das zeitkonstituierende Kontinuum ist ein Fluß stetiger Erzeugung von Modifikationen von Modifikationen … ; sie sind nicht nur Modifikationen in Beziehung auf (die Urimpression) sondern auch der Reihe nach Modifikationen voneinander, in der Reihenfolge in der sie verlaufen. 6 (Husserl 1966, 100) These Modifikationen voneinander, modifications of each other, are the key to the constitution of the phenomenon time: if something modifies, it establishes a relationship. Thus we can paraphrase Husserl's notion of time as a topological space of points (time-objects) with neighborhoods established through their relationships. 7 This concept of time supersedes a (Cartesian) notion of a continuous, external time into which the self is embedded, and posits a wholly internal phenomenon, a discrete space of time-objects that enter the visible time-horizon through constitution, in a given order. It is a dynamic space, since every Urimpression modifies the contents, and the ordering of time-objects may be similar to an ordering in "objective time" (objektive Zeit), but phenomenological analysis does not seek to establish a linear correspondence: "The ordering relationships that are found in lived experiences as authentic and immanent cannot be encountered in an 3 Two things are "conjugate" if they share some features but are opposite in others. They are, in a sense, complementary entities of the same category. Protention and retention are relationships of time-objects with other time-objects, and/or the conscious self in the now. In the sense of being "mirrored" across the now, retention and protention are conjugates; as relationships, they merely attach to different categories of time-objects: those that are constituted through a primal impression as such, and those that are constituted through its expectation. 4 Husserl introduces Ursprungsmoment, "primal moment," as a superset of the points of origin of various categories of timeobjects: primal impression, primal memory, primal imagination etc. (Husserl 1966, 101). 5 "Each Primal Moment helps constitute a concrete duration, and the constitution of a concrete duration requires that each point of the former corresponds to a present Now, which itself requires a present Primal Moment for its own constitution." 6 "The time-constituting continuum is a stream of continuous creation of modifications and modifications … ; these are not only modifications with respect to the [primal impression], but also sequential modifications of each other, in the order in which they proceed." 7 Felix Hausdorff is credited with developing the general concept of a topological space. Though Hausdorff and Husserl were contemporaries, Hausdorff's pioneering definition of topological spaces from neighborhood axioms was only published in 1914 in his opus magnum, Principles of Set Theory (Grundzüge der Mengenlehre), and did not achieve broader recognition until after the first World War. This general idea of a "space" thus postdates both the Vorlesungen zum inneren Zeitbewußtsein (Hua X) and the Bernauer Manuskripte (Hua XXXIII). Husserl's own mental model of the time-horizon has greater similarity to the idea of number, which after all was the topic of his 1887 habilitation Über den Begriff der Zahl (On the Concept of Number). empirical, objective ordering; they do not fit in." (die Ordnungszusammenhänge, die in den Erlebnissen als echten Immanenzen zu finden sind, lassen sich nicht in der empirischen, objektiven Ordnung antreffen, fügen sich ihr nicht ein) (Husserl 1966, 6). Their relative order is initially given by the sequence of their constitution, but it can be subject to reordering in subsequent modification. Time objects for which the order is not distinguished are contemporaneous, and those that are contemporaneous with an Urimpression, which contains a new now, 8 form the totality of the present. The ordering need not be stable if the phenomenon suggests it is not, and time-objects can mergejust as sequential notes merge into one unified impression of melody. Urimpressionen constitute the everrenewed now, replenishing our time-horizon with objects, which leave the horizon as they fade through modification by other time-objectslost, or committed to memory. Importantly there is no "aether" 9 in which these objects are embedded: duration is constituted from the topology, that is, from local neighborhood relations of timeobjects, not as a distance measured between them. Such time-objects are, therefore, not "objects" experienced in the "stream" of time-consciousness ("subjects"). Rather, they are the very constituting fabric of the "stream." Just as consciousnessand thus the "phenomenon"is not a product of perception, rather, consciousness, being in no sense decomposable, is strongly emergent: the primal impression is not commensurate with the domain of sensations. Husserl 10 implicitly acknowledges this emergence by giving the primal impression an axiomatic status in the generation of time-objects, yet this in and of itself does not solve the problems of regress of constitution, as we will discuss below. Nevertheless, constitution, interaction, and modification of time-objects underlie the paradigm shift expressed in Husserl's phenomenological analysis: which is to unfold a present that is not only a moment in a consciousness that is swept along by the river of time, but Husserl's now has extent, has contents within a time-horizon, and here time-consciousness arises.

Gegenwart: Zeitobjekte as lived experience
As a phenomenological concept, Husserl's notion of time-objects indeed suggests a shift towards a complete reconsideration of "consciousness," on a level that is a priori to the more familiar and accepted Cartesian subject/object model: the field of "lived experience." From Husserl's phenomenological perspective, "time-objects" is not simply another concept, but a "primordial time-field" (ursprüngliches Zeitfeld) that evokes sensations (Empfindung) of lived experience, and contrary to the abstract quality of perception (Wahrnehmung) that is merely an appearance: Das empfundene Rot ist ein phänomenologisches Datum, das, von einer gewissen Auffassungsfunktion beseelt, eine objektive Qualität darstellt; es ist nicht selbst eine Qualität. Eine Qualität im eigentlichen Sinne, d.h. eine Beschaffenheit des erscheinenden Dinges, ist nicht das empfundene, sondern das wahrgenommene Rot. (Husserl 1966, 6) 11 The union of time-objects present in consciousnessthat is, "visible"constitutes the unique time horizon of each moment. 12 We picture the self at the "origin" of this domain by virtue of it being coincident with every Ur-impression. Instead of justifying the existence of a momentary now, which is fundamentally measured by a physical and thus "objective" time, we find that in a conceivable landscape of time-objects, we encounter the concrete presence and a sensed present: the Gegenwart of time-objects rather than an abstract notion of the Jetzt; the self gives this Gegenwart extent through uniting all those timeobjects that are experienced as contemporaneous with the now. This is a beautiful set of concepts that naturally addresses the paradox of the not-now in the now. What we have yet to examine however is the precise nature of the relationships immanent in time-objects that give the time-horizon its dynamic structure. This is best done in concrete examples of lived experience, and we will thus explore three poems in which the experience of time plays a crucial role.
Wáng Wéi 王維 (701-761), the eighth-century Chinese all-round artist, a painter, musician and above all, a poet, is best known for his artistic mastery of pentasyllabic quatrains and the spiritual lightness of his nature poems. As one of the three greatest poets of the Táng 唐 dynasty (the other two are Lı  Bái 李白and Dù Fŭ 杜甫), his poems have been frequently anthologized and translated into Western languages. His poetic language has a unique stylistic simplicity, so "simple" that his works are included in every Chinese primary school curriculum. However, no classical poet in Chinese history questions the boundary of poetic experience with such bold and plain, yet subtle, language as Wáng Wéi. His poems have been called "Chán poetry" 13 ; scholarship that emphasized the role of Chán Buddhism in Wáng Wéi's poetics, going as far as labeling him the "Poet Buddha" [詩佛, shī fó], has been published literally for more than a thousand years.
Chosen from Wáng Wéi's well-known poetic cycle "Wa  ng River Cycle" ( 《輞川集》, Wa  ng Chuān Jí), this poem presents the encounter of an egret with a gushing stream fed by autumn rain. However, the real theme is not simply the capture of a momentary image 11 "The sensation red is a phenomenological point of reference, inspired by a certain function of apprehension, represents an objective quality; it is not itself a quality. A quality in its proper sense, that is, a property of the manifesting thing, is not the sensation, but the perception of red." 12 This analogy between time-horizon and visual horizon is based on Husserl's observation: "the time-field … is in a sense displaced along perceived and freshly remembered movement, and its objective time, just as the visual field along objective space." (das Zeitfeld … verschiebt sich gleichsam über die wahrgenommene und frisch erinnerte Bewegung, und ihre objektive Zeit, ähnlich wie das Gesichtsfeld über den objektiven Raum) (Husserl 1966, 31). 13 The Chinese word 禪, Chán is better known in the West in its Japanese pronunciation "Zen." Chán refers to a school of the Buddhist tradition that emphasizes sudden enlightenment in everyday life, rather than reclusive meditation. of the egret, nor the continuous flow of water, but a poetic consciousness of Gegenwart: how the now, the present, and the presence that is unfolded through a unique timehorizon, is constituted in consciousness through time-objects, and their intrinsic intertwining. Luán's Falls Amidst a swirling autumn rain. A surge is gurgling over stones, two wavelets leap, collide and splash, startling an egret, rushing on.
Recent scholarship in the English-speaking world has considered this poem to represent the "authenticity of unmediated perception" (Owen 1981, 31) that arises prior to cognitive realization. In other words, it is considered a pure phenomenon, as Wai-lim Yip describes: "In Wang Wei, the scenery speaks and acts. The poem has become, even before the act of composition, Phenomenon itself and can allow the things in it to emerge as they are without being contaminated by intellectuality" (Yip 1972, vi). However, such interpretation has also been challenged to lack depth: "what would a world of Pure Phenomenon be like? It would presumably be one of surface rather than depth, of the transparent and immediate, rather than the opaque and deferred" (Yu 2008, 181). While this advances from the Chinese tradition that views Wáng Wéi solely as the poetic voice of the Chán (Zen)-Buddhist spirit, 14 such debate reveals a misinterpretation of the concept of phenomenon in literary criticism since it presents a false dichotomy between perception (appearance) and reality (essence). The idea of phenomenon, in contrast to the Cartesian notion of object, precisely goes beyond such dichotomy, and in his 1960 radio essay on the poems of the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstamm , Paul Celan points out that true poetry is indeed phenomenal: Sie sind keine "Wortmusik", keine aus "Klangfarben" zusammengewobene, impressionistische "Stimmungspoesie", keine das Wirkliche sinnbildlich überhohende "zweite" Wirklichkeit. Ihre Bilder widerstehen dem Begriff der Metapher und des Emblems; sie haben phänomenalen Charakter … . 15 (Celan 1999, 215) The "phenomenal character" mentioned by Celan points to the things themselves, that which we actually perceive, the time-objects that provide a sensory polyvalence as their interactions intersect in "various angles of sight, various refractions and dispersions which are not mere appearance." 16 Gegenwart is not confined to the physical now, but pliably accommodates, within and beyond consciousness, all the polysemy of the concurrent phenomena, all of their ambiguities; it binds all immanent duration into a perceived "instant." The notion of appearance, in contrast to the phenomenon, precisely excludes the 14 For the traditional Chinese scholarship on Wáng Wéi's poetics, see Chen 2015, 44-48;Chen 2014, 52. 15 "They [the poems] are not 'word-music,' they are not woven together out of 'sound fibers,' not impressionistic 'moodpoetry'; they are not the 'second' reality that is symbolically protected by the real. Their images stand against the concept of metaphor and emblem; they have phenomenal character … ." 16 Celan's own words, quoted by Gadamer (1997, 180). sensations of lived experience, and reduces the multi-dimensional richness of phenomenon to a mere quality of object. Reflecting such phenomenological insights, Celan points out that the poetic task is more to render such a spectrum of instant experience tangible, than to represent it merely as external reality or subjective emotion. And poetry is to "reproduce at least linguistically sections from this spectral analysis of things, to make them visible simultaneously in various aspects and in permeations with other things that are related, subordinate, or contrary … ." 17 Simplicity: phenomenal Wáng Wéi's poetic language carries such phenomenological polysemy through utmost simplicity and a profound blandness (淡, dàn) 18 : These are considered "simple" words and sentences. 19 The depth of Wáng Wéi's poems is not derived from any "essence" that is hidden behind the mask of mere "appearance," but is quintessentially phenomenal. Phenomenologically speaking, the simplicity of Wáng Wéi's language delivers us from pursuing any metaphorical or allegorical reading; rather the language performs itself, it elicits meanings that splash out from the "empty" spaces between, beneath, beyond or behind the words, thereby becoming real without presupposing or indeed referencing any particular external reality. It is the time-horizon, a vivid topological space, that is presented here, a unique present (Gegenwart) that timeconsciousness extends between scenery and episode, protending the epic 20 dimension of nature's cycles, woven from conceptual but tangible time-objects: water, wind, (two) wavelets, and an egret. Let us pursue the phenomenal complexity of the poem through just one unique perspective of translation.
Translating "self-each-other" If one could only choose one phrase in the original Chinese to reveal both instant and duration of Gegenwart, it would be zìxiāng 自相, literally self-each-other in the third line: tiào bō zì xiāng jiàn 跳波自相濺 (Figure 1). In previous translations of this line ("leaping waves suddenly splash against each other" (Wagner 1975, 43); "leaping waves strike one another -" (Owen 1981, 39); or "leaping waves naturally splash each other" (Yu 2008, 180), the focus was on the literal meaning of these words: generic waves bring about a splash of water. But the Chinese original 17 Celan, as quoted by Gadamer (1997, 180). 18 Dàn is an aesthetic concept derived from an experience of distinguishing the most subtle differences of expressions. 19 How to properly define "poetic simplicity" remains an open question. 20 Here used in the sense of a continuous development of existential content, in contrast to an episodic narrative.
(自相, zì-xiāng)both self and each other, carries the same kind of paradox as the now and not-now we have encountered above, it implies time-objects that acquire selfhood and agency. While we read the first two verses as scenery, setting the stage, it is the tension immanent in the self (自, zì) and each other (相, xiāng) of the waves, their self-not-self, that brings the flow into focus and connects the scenery of the first two lines with the final verse. It is no wonder that if such complexity is lost in translation, it may lead to questioning of the depth of the phenomenon as cited above, as it were, resonating with a common criticism of Wáng Wéi's poetry: artistically skillful but lacking emotional power. 21 The crucial challenge is how to convey the significance of zìxiāng自相 through presenting the wavelets as phenomena or time-objects, that is, preserving the sense of "self-eachother intertwining" which is subtly immanent in the original. We translate tiào bō 跳波 (literally, leaping wave) as two wavelets, thus giving them a fleeting identity, while preventing us from relating the subject with a particular scene: after all, how could wavelets be countable? Paradoxically, as we depart from what appeared at first to be a particular reality, an "empty" space 22 is unfolded through the actions of the individual wavelets suggested by leap, collide, and splash. And as we fill the "empty" space with our own images and memories in Ur-Erinnerung and Ur-Phantasie, 23 we may realize something profound that has been skillfully concealed in this seemingly bland and simple verse: how do we even know what we know here? Who has observed this, who tells of this event? For example, the renowned contemporary scholar Yè Jiā Yíng 葉嘉瑩 regards Wáng Wéi as a master of portraying "stirring" moments, but still considers such moments as the "initial" stage of human emotions and feeling, "not yet" attached to them, and therefore lacking emotional power. See Yè 2008, 229. 22 Of course, that space is not "empty" in the sense of devoid of content, but rather it appears empty in its potential to accept meaning. 23 Primal memory, primal imagination (refer to Husserl 1966, 101). Illustrating Husserl's idea, our translation of tiào bō 跳波 addresses the phenomenological character of time-objects: instead of being "objectified" 24 as an external "reality," our rendering reveals a concrete "time-consciousness" of the poem, a consciousness of Gegenwart that awakes in the sound of the autumn rain; emerges as it falls down the rapids, and fully manifests in the "two wavelets," to confront the other "sentience" in the poem: the egret.
Zeitobjekte: the egret and the stream Does the poet truly see an egret and record his momentary perception of the startled bird? Indeed, to startle (驚, jīng) is a recurring topos in Wáng Wéi's poems: it often alludes to an engendering consciousness rather than referring to an episodic event.
For example, his well-known quatrain "Bird Song Dale" ( 《鳥鳴磵》, Nia  o Mı  ng Jiàn) is centered upon such a phenomenon: "Moonlight breaks out, startles a mountain bird" (月出驚山鳥). In his poem "Facing the Snow in a Winter Night, Remembering Brother 25 Hu's House" ( 《冬晚對雪憶胡居士家》 ), Wáng Wéi also wrote: "Beyond a separating door, the wind startles bamboo" (隔牖風驚竹). An actual egret being startled by a drop of water is as much counter to reason as a mountain bird startled by the slowly rising moon. These phenomena, whether startled birds or bamboo leaves, are not represented as poetic objects, 26 but as a tangible sentience, an Other that asserts itself within an alert mind of the Self. Wáng Wéi's poetics point to this quintessentially internal source of the phenomenon, the Urimpression, without explicitly announcing it. And he masterfully articulates the origin of this self-consciousness of the Other through the temporal movement of an egret.
Thus, the pivot of the poem resides in the last line, bái lù jīng fù xià白鷺驚復下in which the poem's "consciousness," or a certain poetic self-consciousness, becomes shared between the egret and the stream. A standard reading of classical Chinese (文言, wényán) would attach the egret as the shared subject to both verbs: startling (驚, jīng) and descending (下, xià); phenomenologically however, the two wavelets and the startled egret together function as complementary parts of one integrated visionan immanent time horizon, and suggest that 下xià may just as well refer to the falling of rain (秋雨, qiūyŭ) or the stream, surging over the stones (石溜, shíliù) as to the egret.
Such reading, aligned with the phenomenological perspective we developed on Selfeach-Other (自相, zì-xiāng), unfolds the apparently paradoxical nature of Gegenwart. Pointing to a potential noncoincidence 27 between startling (驚, jīng) and descending (下, xià), rather than to the previous "a white egret is startled, and then descends again" (Wagner 1975, 43); or "a white egret startles up, comes down again" (Owen 1981, 39); or "a white egret, startled, descends again" (Yu 2008, 180), we shift the subject of descending (下, xià) in the English translation to the water itself: "rushing on," leaving the egretas a visualized expression of an interstitial spacein an 24 On the question of how time-objects are constituted without being "objectified," and how Husserl himself was not always successful in addressing this problem, see Zahavi 2004. 25 We translate jū shì 居士 ("Householder" or Gahapati), a lay Buddhist practitioner, as "Brother."

26
Here, object is not the time-object, but used in the Kantian sense of Gegenstand, the perceived entity, not (yet) the object of knowledge (refer to Caygill 1995, 304). 27 Noncoincidence is used here in the sense of Jessica Wiskus's recent interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, which refers to "the gap between a work and the engagement it inspires" (Wiskus 2013, 4).
almost peripheral but all the more present role of being startled by the water's pulse, and translate: "startling an egret, rushing on." Let us pursue a phenomenological development of the poem's time-horizon as we enter this verse. We have established atmosphere and scenery in the first two verses and they have evokedpresumablycomposite time-objects that have replaced the individual words in our horizon. The stream has emerged as an active retention in the third verse and the last character, splash (濺, jiàn), has complemented the encounter of the wavelets that currently constitutes the present, tethering the "sentience" of the waves to this movement. Now the egret is constituted in an Urimpression, and joins the same present in our time-horizon with an uncertain protention; it is clearly not yet the next-actor, 28 but when it is startled we realize that it was the splash that startled it, and the waves and egret join together as co-actors, extending the present further and further. It is from this unity of action and present that the last two characters of the verse may refer to the stream, just as much as the bird, thus turning what would otherwise be a concluded, external episode into an open-ended epos of a natural phenomenon: once again, a pre-reflectional Urimpression.

Textual landscapes
This shift of focus from the egret back to the stream has a profound consequence. To illustrate, we employ a textual landscape that does not represent any specific location or site, but is a "poetic realization" 29 of the poem's multi-layered polysemy and time-objects. Such textual landscapes are configurative diagrams, a "visual grammar," 30 which graphically maps the intrinsic formations and potential structures of poetic concepts, in the sense that the components stand in for time-objects. They are a sketch of the time-horizon ( Figure 2).
The diagrams juxtapose a poetic sense of the translations: the unity of the escalating flow of water, from swirling raindrops to the stream that rushes beyond perception in our translation, and the emphasis on contrasts in the disconnected, episodic stanzas of the previous translations. Rather than contrasting the episodic horizontal and vertical commotions of the rain, the stones, the wavelets, and the egret, we integrate the poem's consciousness, in which the egret becomes an embodied poetic expression of the splashing wavelets, a rising, white flurry of movement, which both contrasts with and stands in for the cascading mist. Such an instantembodied and presented through the egretis indeed not merely to be grasped as a moment, and what we have seen is, in fact, not simply as a poetic "object," but as a gap between the naked perception and our image of it. 31 As the poem unfolds, we encounter two domains of experience: the nascent 28 This becomes even more evident if we imagine the egret to do something unrelated, such as preen its feathers. In that case, the splashing wavelets would immediately be displaced into the past, and the egret alone would occupy the present. 29 Thomas Sparr introduces Christiaan Hart-Nibbrig's term "textual landscape" in order to indicate that nature and landscape in Celan's poems no longer function as the representation of any specific location or site, but entirely as "poetic realization" (Sparr 1989, 62). The same can be said of Wáng Wéi's poem here. Like Celan, Wáng Wéi achieves an integration of the theme and structure of his poetry by preventing any precise interpretability of reference, offering instead a multilayered polysemy. The "rain," "stone," "voice," "wavelets," "cascades," and "egret" in this poem thus do not reflect any particular natural landscape, but formulate a unique "textual landscape." 30 For more uses of this tool see Chen 2012Chen , 2014Chen , 2015 For an interpretation on the phenomenological significance of such a "gap," see Wiskus 2013, 4. stream and the sentient egret. The egret provides for a conceptual caesura in a miniature epos of the stream; but our attention remains entirely with the flow, emanating from the rain, acquiring material force, manifesting in action, intersecting its presence with the egret's sentience and rushing onward, far past the poem's semantic bounds. 32 Figure 2. Two textual landscapes for translations of "Luán Jiā Lài." The circles mark the poetic concepts (time-objects), and arrows show their relationships. The top part presents the sequential flow of the events in our phenomenological translation, and the bottom part illustrates disjointed episodes, a consensus of the previous, more literal translations. Both are valid readings. 32 Contrast this for example with the closure that "startling an egret rushing up" would create.

Infinite regress: Husserl's problem
Husserl's "primary moment" constitutes a time-object at its phenomenological Nullpunkt that corresponds to a physical time (its actualized now). But then the time-object undergoes incessant modification. This raises a problem: incessant modification is a process, and as such it has a temporal dimension. Thus every modification itself requires a previous, deeper level of constitution in timeupon which its constitution has to be constituted. Rudolf Bernet describes this: "The retentional grasping of the initial primary impression would be tied to a running-through of an infinite series of modifications nested into one another" (Bernet 2010, 9). Although Husserl's theory of fading (Abklang) as an innate feature of retention patches the problem by declaring the regression to converge to a finite limit, 33 he cannot have been comfortable with the structural consequence of having each time-object, each modification, essentially contain its own inner clock. 34 Contending with such "infinite regress" is a topic not only of his earlier texts, but also of the later works such as Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein (1917/18), and the C-Manuskripte (1929-1934: "Everywhere, it seems, the threat of infinite regress" (Überall drohen, scheint es, unendliche Regresse) (Husserl 2001, 271). 35 Modification, however, is not the only regress. An even more tenacious issue arises from the constituting nature of the self, the need for an "absolute consciousness"a constituting source of "self-awareness"that is not itself constituted. 36 According to Dan Zahavi, since Husserl insists on identifying consciousness with "object-constitution" and "reflective objectification," his phenomenological analyses are not able to accommodate a non-reflective, pre-conscious flow of life; he overlooks that "the primal stream is conscious in and through itself in a non-objectifying manner, and it is its possession of this pre-reflective self-awareness that allows the stream to reflect upon itself, thereby constituting immanent temporal objects" (Zahavi 2004, 108). But concepts such as flow, stream, and so forth already imply a temporal dimension which makes their role in the constitution of time-consciousness appear tautological. Bernet discusses how Husserl's notion of "primary presentation" (Urpräsentation) implies that this originary process, as the life-process of consciousness, is governed by passive tendencies and anticipations, by forms of the increasing and weakening of the intuitive fullness of different phenomena, by the lived-experiences of an incessant "fulfillment" (Erfüllung) and "emptying" (Entfüllung). (Bernet 2010, 12) 33 This is convergence in the mathematical sense: a finite limit of an infinite series, such that "the fading-modifications are bidirectional and extend into infinity in their mathematical idealisation, but have a 'finite' limit" (dass die Abklangsmodifikationen zweiseitig sind und insofern in mathematischer Idealisierung ins unendliche gehen, aber im "Endlichen" einen Limes haben.) (Husserl 2001, 66). 34 Continuous modification is a process over time. Husserl described the modifications as containing their own now: "All fading of a present is itself present" (Jeder Abklang von einer Gegenwart ist selbst gegenwärtig …) (Husserl 2001, 65). Note that this posits the process to be intrinsic to the time-object, thereby constituting a kind of inner clock. The problem is explored in C-Manuskript Nr. 4 "Phenomenology of Fading-Phenomena" (Zur Phänomenologie der Abklangsphänomene) (Husserl 2001, 65 and following pages), without conclusive resolution. 35 Note that our paraphrase of Husserl's model as a topological spacegiven abovedoes not suffer from such regress: modifications arise from relationships between time-objects, their retentions and protentions. No constitution outside the origin within the time-horizon, the experienced now, is required, neither is reference to an embedding stream of time, or an autonomous inner dynamic within the time-object that is, no "inner clock." However, we would not consider this model to go beyond Husserl, we are merely reconstituting the foundations of his ideas with the benefit of hindsight and access to later models of topology and graph theory. 36 Refer to Zahavi 2004, 99. The Urimpression as "life-process of consciousness" is however exactly subject to the problem of a regress of constitution. Are we asking the right question here? Indeed, we acknowledge a gap, or an abyss that separates the phenomenological time of lived experience and physical time. But any attempt to resolve the gap on Husserl's behalf were to deny the significance of his questioning.
Let us walk therefore a few steps with Paul Celan to explore this abyss.

Abgrund in Paul Celan's poetics
In reading Paul Celan's poetry, we return again and again to the autopoetics proclaimed in "Der Meridian," his 1960 Georg Büchner Prize award speech. A fragment in a draft locates our question: Das Gedicht hat, wie der Mensch, keinen zureichenden Grund … . Vielleicht auch: das Gedicht hat seinen Grund in sich selbst; mit diesem Grund ruht es … im Grundlosen. 37 (1999,88) Grund challenges translation: polysemic, it can be motif, cause, and reason, an area or domain, as well as bottom and foundation. While zureichendadequate, sufficientwould select the motif reading of Grund, this is promptly contradicted with the locating ruht (rests). Thus the literal readings "to reach there," "to extend towards" of zu-reichen immediately co-exist with "suffice": we are lacking sufficient grounds and fail to be grounded. This Grund reappears by its absence in das Grundlose, which makes it abyssal and unfathomable, and baseless, unfounded, uncaused. But where is the abyss located? Georg Büchner's Lenz (1836) begins: "[On] the 20th Lenz went through the mountains"; we accompany Lenz through a vivid scenery of drooping boughs, rivulets crossing the path, a cold and moisture-laden fog scraping the shrubbery, languid, blunthe did not mind. Then -"No weariness beset him, it was just that at times it annoyed him not to be able to walk on his head." 38 (Müdigkeit spürte er keine, nur war es ihm manchmal unangenehm, daß er nicht auf dem Kopf gehn konnte …) (Büchner 1836).
With one brilliant figure Büchner upends our fellowship: Lenz's point of reference assaults our own; his desire to walk on his head is as much urge for radical alienation as it foreshadows the coming crisis. Celan quotes this line and continues: "He who walks on his head, Ladies and Gentlemen,whoever walks on his head, has an abyssal heaven beneath him." (Wer auf dem Kopf geht, meine Damen und Herren,wer auf dem Kopf geht, der hat den Himmel als Abgrund unter sich) (Celan 2000, 195). Such abyss denies all reason and salvation; here is the self and nothing but.
In contrast to Husserl's efforts for an internal ground without falling into the abyss of "infinite regress," Celan's poetry inverts the ground into an abyss by "walking on the 37 "Like man himself, the poem lacks sufficient grounds. Or also: the poem has its reason within itself; with this foundation it rests in the abyss." (Translator's emphasisthe German has Grund in all three cases.) 38 To walk on one's head is not a common German idiom, certainly not in modern usage. Around Büchner's time of writing, it would have been understood as a metaphor of folly, madness: upending common reason: "If citizens were to arrogate the powers of the authorities, and the authorities, fearing an uprising, had to obey the citizens, that would be as if one wanted to think with his feet and walk on his head." (Wenn die Bürger sich des obrigkeitlichen Gewalts anmaßen wollten, und die Obrigkeit hingegen aus Furcht eines Aufstandes, den Bürgern pariren müsse, so sey es, als wenn einer mit den Füßen denken, und auf dem Kopf gehen wolle) (Ochs 1797, 227). head." The philosophy of Ab-grund, according to Antti Salminen, is rooted in the interpretation of the pre-fix ab-(ex-, off-, from, away), which is not necessarily a complete negation, but an effort of "building a space between ground and groundless" (Salminen 2012, 230). Such an abyss could also be "horizontal," as Salminen further interprets: "[it] is bound not to physical gravity but to the gravity of language and writing itself … . This is horizontal abyss … : if the abysses turn sideways, writing becomes an act of falling" (Salminen 2012, 237-238). In short, Abgrund or "infinite regress" is not a problem but a site of encounter for Celan.
Moreover, such abyss need not be clearly localized: think of a so-called fractal structure such as a Koch curve 39 : it is neatly contained in a topological space, yet exceeds that space's dimension; a journey to such a structure's boundary enters the abyss as the structure itself adds "thickness" to the space that contains it. Celan's poetic notion of Abgrund is such an abyss that surrounds, indeed pervades us: via the infinite regress of the poem's constituted and constituting language, it is the uncanny site of encounter within the self, or, to borrow Husserl's neologism, a Zeithof.

Time-objects and Zeithof
Zeithof was coined by Husserl to indicate the relationships between time-objects: an aesthetic intertwining between time and space that qualifies the nature of Gegenwart. Whenever the primal impression constitutes a time object, with its relationships, retentions ("an intention that provides us with a consciousness of the phase of the object that has just been") and protentions ("a more or less indefinite intention of the phase of the object about to occur"), 40 the primal impression extends the space "in which the now, the just-before and the soon-to-be form a continuum, in which a temporal object, such as a melody, becomes what it is" (Räsänen 2007, 211-212): Jede Wahrnehmung hat ihren retentionalen und protentionalen Hof. (Husserl 1966, 105) 41 Der Zeithof hat auch eine Zukuft. (Husserl 1966, 167) 42 Paul Celan, who had studied Zur Phänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins, embraced Husserl's neologism to express his own poetic position in a traceless adoption.

WEGGEBEIZT
WEGGEBEIZT vom Strahlenwind deiner Sprache das bunte Gerede des Anerlebtendas hundertzüngige Meingedicht, das Genicht. ETCHED OFF by the radiant wind of your speech, the gaudy chit-chat of the all-butexperiencedthe hundredtongued perpoem, the no-em. 39 While a point is a zero-dimensional object, a line is one-dimensional, a plane has two dimensions, fractals have noninteger dimensions (Hausdorff-dimensions), named after Felix Hausdorff (Hausdorff 1919). They are usually constructed from a recursive formula, such as a successive division of intervals, but appear (approximately) in the natural world as models of self-similar structuresthe coastline of Britain is a common example. The Koch snowflake has a finite surface area, bounded by an infinitely long curve that is everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable. Fractals are excellent examples of concepts that the twentieth century has embraced for their potential to accommodate exactly the kind of recursion that the nineteenth century would have dismissed. 40 Refer to Zahavi 2003, 83. 41 Every perception has its retentional and protentional halo. 42 Time-halo also has a future.
Deep in the fissure of times, by hexaform ice waits, a crystal of breath, your final and binding credential.
Celan takes us on a journey into the abyss. It is made possible as the radiant wind of "your" speech etches off falsehood and superficiality. It traverses a path past frozen souls to the glacier, a vast expanse of water stilled to timelessness by freezing. There, we are welcome to the Gletscherstuben, 43 Gletschertischen 44 ; the terms combined, evoke a chalet, or outpost within the crystalline masses. From there, the abyss beckons. This crevasse is a fissure, and like a bergschrund (a glaciological term) or a geological fracture or fault, it is visible testimony of forces acting far below. Hans-Georg Gadamer's beautiful exegesis calls this "fissure of time" the special location where time does not "flow" because "it also stands frozen in eternity," "a construction that cannot be altered, … protected against the influences of 'flowing time'," and the poem is an awaiting, almost intangible "breath-crystal," which is set in contrast to the miraculous geometry (Gadamer 1973, 111;1997, 125). But in this case we disagree with the reading: it is not time but the times that are torn apart 45 and we are not (only) encountering physics, but history, the human condition. It is in this void that we learn who we truly are, embodied in a "crystal of breath." "Zeitenschrunde," "Wabeneis," "Atemkristall,": each neologismformulated through extraordinary combinations, functions as a chord in a contrapuntal poetic fugue: these time-objects scintillate with our futile efforts to locate them in meaning. What words fail to express is constituted in the interstitiae of Celan's neologisms, where referents that a metaphorical or allegorical reading could refer to are denied. 46 This is what Heidegger would call Nennkraft (naming power): "Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. This naming nominates beings to their being and from out of that being" 47 (Indem die Sprache erstmals das Seiende nennt, bringt solches Nennen das Seiende erst zum Wort und zum Erscheinen. Dieses Nennen ernennt das Seiende zu seinem Sein aus diesem) (Heidegger 1960, 84;2002, 46). Through such naming, each moment becomes a tangible imagination, yet physically 43 Gletscherstube: the cozy room in an Alpine hut located by a glacier.

44
Gletschertisch: a geological term for a slab of rock, transported by a glacier's flow, elevated above the ablated surface by a fragile pedestal of ice. As often with Celan, a technical term taken out of its original context becomes a neologism by displacement. 45 The German Zeiten (in Zeitenschrunde) differs from Zeit in the same way that times and time are not the same. 46 As one of Celan's critics rightly pointed out, in these neologisms "joined to form structural language-masses, the decisive element is not the view but, rather, the combinations" (Celan and Bachmann 2010, 191). 47 Italics as per original.
inconceivable Gegenwart, whereas the conceptual paradox of the now (eine Erscheinung eines Nicht-Jetzt im Jetzt) is transformed into an existential, unredeemable, most precise poetic ambiguity. The Atem, our breath is our most innate, indeed, in the older form Odem, the divine spirit within life itself. By casting it into crystalline stasis, Celan locates it outside of time, in the abyss that surrounds us on all sides. Instead of dealing with a problem of "infinite regress," Celan seeks out the abyss between the times, and there we find that paradox is not the dilemma of the self, but its necessary condition. "Embodiment experienced from within": Santōka Taneda's Haiku of "walking"

Being time
Since the publication of Husserl's later Manuscripts: The Bernau Manuscripts and The C-Manuscripts, one of the remaining questions is how to reconcile the two seemingly separate domains of Husserl's time-consciousness: the unspeakable, timeless, transcendental ground as a primal, constituting source, and the phenomena that are closely associated with bodily instincts, desires, and drives (Mensch 2010, 247). This is not incidental, but rooted in Husserl's insistence on the fundamental distinction between the constituting and the constituted phenomenon of time-consciousness.
We propose that we have met this question before. Rather than seeing time consciousness as constituted by the self, the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen Master Dōgen expressed an innovative notion of time as "being-time," which he identified with the self: "In the time one climbed the mountains and crossed the rivers, there was oneself. There must be time in oneself. Since one-self exists, time cannot leave. If time is not the appearance of going and coming, the time of climbing a mountain is the immediate present of being-time. If time preserves the appearance of going and coming, there is in oneself the immediate present of being timethis is being time" (Dōgen 1991, 105). Such unification of being and time is fully embodied in the haiku of the Japanese itinerant monk and free-verse haiku pioneer Santōka Taneda (1882-1940. For Santōka, haiku is not an expression of the art of language, but rooted in an existential and embodied movement, that is, in "walking," which literally became his life between 1926 and 1940, years that he spent alone, walking and begging, criss-crossing central and southern Japan, with only brief interruptions. Through walking, the constituting condition and the constituted embodiment of time are intertwined, and from such embodied unification, Santōka's haiku is his "time-being." Comparison: "walking, on and on" 歩きつづける彼岸花咲きつづける. 48 (arukitsuzukeru higanbana sakitsuzukeru) (Santōka 2003, 179) Walking, on and on stygian lilies blooming, on and on.
As is characteristic of the haiku form, we encounter radical minimalism. Barely three timeobjects are contained in these three phrases, but this simplicity is deceptive and sends us 48 This haiku was composed around 1927. on a profound journey. The 7-5-6 mora 49 pattern of Santōka's haiku departs from the traditional 5-7-5 form, and there is no "cutting word" (切れ字, kireji) that the traditional form would require, to provide a kind of caesura in continued thought, or closure at the end. Santōka's work is after all free verse. But other elements are aligned with the tradition: the dialectic juxtaposition of two ideas, and even the use of a rather common "season word" (季語, kigo): "red spider lily" 50 (彼岸花, Higanbana), a flower that characteristically blooms in autumn, on which the first and third phrase are balanced. In this balancing, the Higanbana assume a rather special role. Semantically, the blooming lilies are a part of the final phrase, which they initiate. But do they? We might cut the poem differently, and let the first two phrases stand alone, in a pattern that is not uncommon for Santōka, 51 perhaps like "Walking on and on; lilies. The blooming goes on and on." The absence of punctuation allows both readings, and places the lilies into the boundary of walking and blooming: one, an activity, the other, a mode of being.
Or is walking indeed an activity? Santōka's walking is often purposeless, for him, it is a mode of life and a form of poetry by itself. His life is not sustainable without walking; while walking, everything can be written as poetry. The purpose of this walking is not to move through space, but to move through time. This creates the parallel of poet and flower moving on and on continuously " … つづける" 52 on and on, on and on, keep on walking, blooming, beinga continuity that unifies time not as what happens, but what is; here, walking becomes truly phenomenological, as it indeed constitutes an "embodiment as experienced from within" (Mensch 2010, 251) (Italics are in author's original.).
The blooming lilies mediate and separate, through their rich cultural connotations. Literally, they are "flowers (花, hana) from the other shore (彼岸, higan)", and the shore is that of the Sanzu River (三途の川, sanzu no kawa), the boundary between this life and the afterlife of the Japanese Buddhist tradition, just like the Styx of antiquity (hence our translation of "stygian lillies"). The actual red spider lily is at the same time beautiful, a vibrant red fringe around the golden rice paddies of autumn, yet a lethal poison, a repellent of rodents, and a traditional tribute to the deada unification of opposites. Santōka's walking as a physical and spiritual activity meanders back and forth on the riverbanks between "higan" (the other shore) and "shigan" (this shore). This world and the afterworld are not vertically separated; they are on the same plane and can be transcended, but in Santōka's equation this is not a process but a quality of being: one is truly walking among the dual spiritual and bodily soul (魂 魄, konpaku) (Nakajima 1997), but these souls are in the end ourselves.
In this unification however, the higanbana seem to become a paradox: a burgeoning life that symbolizes its own negation: death, a life that is continuously doing (つづける, -tsuzukeru) that, which is in fact an expression of its being, in the present moment, as in (virtual) eternity. In this way, we have a "time-object" that resists being an object as it resists being located in time.
Is this higanbana a "time-object" at all? This type of paradox is a familiar topos in Eastern philosophy. In Buddhism, life and death, beauty and skeleton, are but two sides of the same mirror; in Daoism, the ten-thousand things (萬物, wàn wù) arise from 49 Japanese metric stress is determined by morae, or haku (拍), which describe syllable "weight": syllables that contain a final -n, a diphthong or a geminate consonant count for two morae. 50 Lycoris radiata 51 For example: いつも一人で赤とんぼ (itsumo hitoride aka tombo): Always alone. Red dragonfly. (Santōka 2003, 234). 52 From 続 (Go'on: zoku / Kun: tsuzu) to continue. To continue doing whatever the respective verb is that it attaches to.
Nothing, so that the "principle," 53 the polar dichotomies of true and false, mind and body, subject and object, are unified. This possibility is in fact a quintessential merit of Husserl's notion "time-object," where "object" does not only refer to "objectifying" or "intentionality," but to a phenomenon constituted in the experience of the self: this is where time becomes "being-time" and Dōgen and Husserl converge.
It was Santōka's "walking, on and on" that guided us through this comparison. Through exploring the embodied complexity of Husserl's phenomenological concept of time-consciousness, we have walked through Wáng Wéi's "Luán Jiā Lài" in Classical Chinese, Paul Celan's WEGGEBEIZT in German, and Sāntoka Taneda's 歩きつづ ける in Japanese, across cultural, historical, and linguistic barriers. According to Husserl's phenomenological analyses of Zeitbewußtsein, we posed an ill-posed question at the beginning about the now that is not the now, since our concept of the now (Jetzt) is simply a useful abstraction of the "lived experience," that is, the phenomenological time horizon, of Gegenwart. However, all true paradoxes are self-referential; the self-referentiality of time consciousness comes from our ability to become aware. This awareness of consciousness is what allows us to be the Other and the Self at the same time. Our phenomenological peregrination has "walked" us concretely and consciously through the convolutions and paradoxes of this phenomenon. And it is precisely here that literature is not merely the handmaiden of philosophy, but a field of lived experience that manifests and contributes to its grounds.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding YC acknowledges partial funding through a research fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany.