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PÉTUR KNÚTSSON
The result is that when they again lie side by side, two separate
bodies, they cannot fully reconstitute their separate civic identities;
their only recourse is to return to the act of love to try to bring their
unknowing to perfection.
This union of numbers, the first and second person, brings to
mind Martin Buber’s vision of man’s confrontation with the ma-
terial and spiritual worlds (Buber 1986). Buber presents two
‘primary words’, unspeakable, and yet couched in language: I-Thou,
the spiritual, and I-It, the material. In these two primary words
there are two kinds of I. The I of I-It is the I that experiences the
material world, the normal I, the I of everyday. It represents by far
the greater part of our thoughts and actions; without it we could
not function. But the I of I-Thou does not experience; it is the I of
relation, the self in relation to the world, to the existence of other
people, and to the spiritual:
No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and no fancy intervene between
the I and the Thou. The memory itself is transformed, as it plunges out of
its isolation into the union of the whole. No aim, no lust, and no
anticipation intervenes between the I and the Thou. Desire itself is
transformed as it plunges out of its dream into the appearance. Every
means is an obstacle. Only when every means has collapsed does the
meeting come about. (Buber 2000: 26)27
In Graves’s poem the I of experience has found two bodies to
inhabit, and has met there with another I on the same quest. If this
is to be resolved, the I of experience must cease to be: only the I of
relation, of I-Thou, can partake in this knowledge. Thus it is not
true to say that the two identities have experienced each other’s
existence, since the I of I-Thou does not experience. Instead, it
participates, which is the spiritual mode of knowing.
27 Martin Buber (1878–1965) was a seminal Jewish theologian. Ich und Du was first published in
1923, two years after the appearance of the Catholic Ferdinand Ebner’s Das Wort un die geistigen
Realitäten: Pneumatologische Fragmente. Ebner’s treatment of I and Thou is said to have informed the
final third of Buber’s work (Green 1980: v). The writings of Buber, Ebner (1882–1931) and Franz
Rosenzweig (1887–1929), who was also a Jew (Glatzer 1953), form the core of German
pneumatalogical and dialogical (and thus language-focused) writing in the first part of the last
century. According to Green this movement has been described as “a Copernican revolution of
modern thought” (Green 1980: v).
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