- Benjamin transcriptions -
Note: Walter Benjamin, the great Jewish-German philosopher, critic and prose writer, perished in 1940 along the Spanish-French border while fleeing the Nazis. For decades it was assumed, on the basis of anecdotal evidence, that Benjamin took his life so as not to fall into the hands of his Nazi pursuers. New evidence, however, suggests that Benjamin in fact was murdered by Stalinist operatives sifting through crowds of refugees for leftists hostile to Stalin. This view gives a certain sense of comfort, however eerie, to readers who have always felt that Benjamin was not one likely to have taken his life.
The following verse transcriptions are based on Harry Zorn’s translation of Benjamin’s famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History” – an obvious titular nod to Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach.” They should be read as studies for a verse play on the last days of Benjamin’s life, in which the great writer, after considering suicide while desperately waiting for the border to open, decides in favor of life, only to be murdered at the hands of Stalin’s henchmen. The first piece, “The Automaton,” is rather more of a “free rendition” than a “verse transcription,” as the terms Culture and Capital are substituted for historical materialism and theology of the original, in keeping with Slavoj Žižek’s thesis that American multiculturalism has become the predominant ideology fueling late capitalism – the system with which the Economic Men and Women of lore have entered the third millennium A.D.
The Automaton
Once there was an automaton so constructed
that it could play a winning game of chess,
answering its opponent’s each and every move
with a satisfactory, reasoned countermove –
a Turkish puppet smoking a hookah.
A mirror system created the illusion
that the chess table was transparent from all sides.
In fact, though, a diminutive hunchback
sat below, guiding the puppet by means of strings.
The puppet’s name is Culture. It wins every time
and can easily take on anyone
if it enlists the services of Capital,
which, in spite of being more or less everywhere,
does its utmost to remain out of sight.
Redemption
Our image of happiness, reflection tells us,
is colored by the time to which our existence
has assigned us. The kind of happiness
that could arouse envy in us exists only
in the air we’ve breathed, among people we’ve talked to,
with lovers who’ve given themselves to us.
That’s to say, the image we have of happiness
is indissolubly bound up with the image
of redemption. The same goes for the past
(or how we view it…and this we call History).
The past carries with it a temporal index
by which it is referred to redemption.
Between past generations and the present one
there is a secret agreement, and our coming,
our arrival on earth, was expected.
Like every generation that preceded us,
we’ve been endowed with a Messianic power,
however weak, to which the past lays claim –
a claim that can’t be inexpensively settled.
Judgment Day
What sane chronicler would find it at all useful
at this late point in time to distinguish
major from minor events? He who refuses
to do so acknowledges the following truth:
that nothing whatsoever that’s happened
is lost to History or escapes from its clutch.
But only a redeemed mankind receives the past
in its fullness. Only for a redeemed
mankind does the past become fully citable
in all its moments. This we know as Judgment Day.
In the Sky of History
As flowers ever turn to face the sun,
by dint of a secret heliotropism
the past strives to turn toward the sun that is rising.
It rises in the sky of history.
The Truest Picture of the Past
The truest picture of the past flits right on by.
For the past can only be seized as an image
which flashes up at the very instant
when it can be seen, then is never seen again.
Each image of the past that isn’t recognized
by the present as one of its concerns
is likely to disappear irretrievably.
Jeopardy
To articulate History means to seize hold
of a memory as it flashes up
at a moment of danger that jeopardizes
both a tradition’s content and its receivers.
In each era, the attempt must be made
to wrest tradition from the clasp of a deadly
conformism about to overpower it.
The Messiah comes as the redeemer,
but also as the subduer of Antichrist.
If the enemy wins, even the dead will not
be safe. And he never ceases to win.
Against the Grain
Empathy with the victor invariably
benefits the rulers. Whoever has emerged
victorious participates willy
nilly in the triumphal procession in which
those in charge step over those who are in their charge,
and the spoils are part of the procession.
The spoils are what we know as “cultural treasures,”
and we shouldn’t contemplate them without horror.
For we owe their existence not only
to the efforts of those who have created them,
but also to the anonymous exertions
of their less happy contemporaries.
There is no document of civilization
that is not a document of barbarism.
And barbarism also taints the way
in which a document is handed from owner
to owner, the way in which it is transmitted,
from which we seek to disengage ourselves.
Our task is to brush history against the grain.
Untenable
The amazement that things like this can still happen
in the 20th-century is not
philosophical, not the outset of knowledge,
except insofar as it’s also the knowledge
that the view of history it implies
is unphilosophical…nay, untenable.
Angelus Novus
In Klee’s Angelus Novus, an angel appears
as though he is about to move away
from something he is fixedly contemplating –
his eyes staring, his mouth open, and his wings spread.
Let’s call him the Angel of History.
His unswerving gaze is directed to the past.
Where we perceive a chain of disparate events,
he sees but a single catastrophe
hurling wreckage after wreckage into his step.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
and make whole once again what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing from out of Paradise,
and has got caught in his wings with such violence
that the angel can no longer close them.
The storm irresistibly propels him into
the future to which his back is turned, while the pile
of debris before him mounts to the sky.
What is the name of this storm? We call it Progress.
Tiger’s Leap
History is the occupant of a structure
whose site is not homogeneous time
but time that is filled with the presence of the Now.
Revolution gleans a past which is overcharged
with the time of the Now, to be blasted
right out of the continuum of history.
It takes place as a tiger’s leap into the past –
as for the Jews each slice of time is like
the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
* * *
The People On the Train
- to the spirit of Walter Benjamin -
Caught up in a single motion from pane to pane,
the view changed as they passed from peak to peak.
See them waving to us – the people on the train,
who’ve already witnessed the things of which we speak.
And history grows all hale and hirsute.
The senses are free to wander around the house,
the eye involved in its continual pursuit
of events like a cat chasing a mouse,
no longer monitored by the retiring ear,
itself not so sharp as when things were powered by steam.
We were here, they were there. Or were they here?
A question that highlights how faded we all seem –
like a chorus ending a long-forgotten show
which marks the real limits of what we know.
The train has not come in. It was only a dream.
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