Benjamin's Passagen:Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century
[Exposé of 1935]
"The waters are blue, the plants pink; the evening is sweet to look on;
One goes for a walk; the grandes dames go for a walk; behind them stroll the petites dames."
-Nguyen Trong Hiper (Hanoi, 1897)
"But precisely modernity is always citing primal history. Here, this occurs through the ambiguity peculiar to the social relations and products of this epoch. Ambiguity is the appearance of dialectic in images, the law of dialectics at a standstill."
"They are residues of a dream world. The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking."
[Exposé of 1939]
"History is like Janus; it has two faces. Whether it looks at the past or at the present, it always sees the same things."
-Maxime Du Camp.
Rolf Tiedemann on the Benjaminean dialectics at a standstill:
... That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event....
...He tried to represent the nineteenth century as 'commentary on a reality' rather than construing it in the abstract...
...Like Goethe's Empirie, it does not deduce the essence behind or above the thing- it knows it in the things themselves...
...Under capitalist relationships of production, history could be likened to the unconscious actions of the dreaming individual, at least insofar as history is man-made, yet without consciousness of design, as if in a dream....
...Both represented attempts to break the fixations and the encrustations in which thinking and its object, subject and object, have been frozen under the pressure of industrial production...
...Benjamin sought a concept of experience that would explode the limitations set by Kant and regain the fullness of the concept of experience held by earlier philosophers...
...Benjamin knew that this motif of awakening separated him from the Surrealist. They tried to abolish the line of demarcation between life and art, to shut off poetry in order to live writing or write life. For the early Surrealists, both dream and reality would unravel to be dreamed, unreal reality, from which no way led back to contemporary praxis and its demands...
"She would stroll about the city of Jerusalem like the spirit of poetry walking along the street"
-Leah Goldberg on Else Lasker-Schüler
"Her huge animated raven-black eyes always had an elusive, mysterious look... it was impossible to go anywhere without stopping to stare... She was the Prince of Thebes, Jussuf, Tino of Baghdad, the Black Swan."
-Gottfried Benn on Else Lasker-Schüler
"Dear Mill, I thank you for your beautiful card, it is here the time: Rain (Regen) but one day sunshine 20 grad, other day the sea from the sky. Here now all good. We all people very good, the Englishmen all gentlemen. I have momentan picture Austellung. A gentleman here has given me extra money for a travel through Palestine. Still one moment I go to Baghdad and Damascus and Beirut and one day to Cairo. One day from here for a Pfund to travel. But I'm very sorry for the world. All the men which dead now. Write soon again, yours, Yussuf"
-Else Lasker-Schüler to Emil Raas, Jerusalem, Hotel Vienna, 1940
...The nineteenth century is a dream we must wake up from; it is a nightmare that will weigh on the present as long as its spell remains unbroken. According to Benjamin, the images of dreaming and awakening from the dream are related as expression is related to interpretation...
...Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it a reactivation of mythical forces...
...And in this same way, iron construction and glass architecture are transfigured in the arcades because the century could not match the new technical possibilities with a new social order...
... They're part of Blochian dreaming ahead, day-dreaming, anticipating the future: Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself...
... The Passagen-Werk was supposed to bring nothing less than a 'Copernican revolution' of historical perception. Past history would be grounded in the present, analogous to Kant's epistemological grounding of objectivity in the depths of the subject. The first revolution occurred in the relationship in which subject and object, present and past meet in historical perception...
"History is the object of a construct whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by Jetztzeit. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It quoted ancient Rome" (Illuminations)
..The present would provide the text of the book; history, the quotatins in that text. To write history means to cite history...
...Benjamin invented the term dialectical images, for such configuration of the Now and the Then; he defined their content as a dialectic at standstill. Dialectical image and dialectical at standstill are, without a doubt, the central categories of the Passagen-Werken...
[Exposé of 1935]
"Ambiguity is the manifest imagining of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia, and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish."
...Benjamin's dialectic tried to halt the flow of the movement, to grasp each becoming as being...
...Political action, no matter how destructive, should always reveal itself as messianic. Benjamin's historical materialism can be hardly severed from political messianism...
...Myth is liquidated in the dialectical image to make room for the dream of a thing; this dream is the dialectic at standstill, the piecing together of what history has broken to its bits, the tikkun of the Lurianic Kabbalah...
...But Benjamin's historiographer is endowed with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim...
From the journals of Lisa Fittko
"The world was coming apart, I thought, but not Benjamin's politesse"
"But it seems to me now that the real danger was not disregarded by Walter Benjamin during that night in Port-Bou; it was just that his real danger, his reality, differed from ours. He must have met again the little hunchback in Port-Bou.. his very own, the Benjamin hunchback, and he had to come to terms with it..."
Gershom Scholem on Benjamin
...The third requirement of his friendship, that of overlooking his secretiveness, often demanded a real effort, because there was something surprising, even ludicrous, about secretiveness in someone as sober, as melancholy as Benjamin...
"Do other people manage to have peace and quiet? I'd like to know the answer to that" (Benjamin)
...The word irgendwie (somehow) is the stamp of a point of view in the making. I never have heard anyone use this word more frequently than Benjamin...
"If I ever have a philosophy of my own, it somehow will be a philosophy of Judaism" (Benjamin)
...For years, however, he stubbornly expounded the strange thesis, to me and to others, that there was no such a thing as an unhappy love - a thesis that was so decisively refuted by the course of his own life...
"Philosophy is absolute experience, deduced in the systematic-symbolic context as language" (Benjamin)
...This is when I first noticed Benjamin's basic melancholy, the incipient depressive traits that later became more pronounced...
...Great though Benjamin's life may be in every sense - the only case near me of a life being led metaphysically . it nevertheless harbors elements of decadence to a fearful extent...
... I learned about Benjamin's death, on September 26 or 27, on November 8 in a brief letters from Hannah Arendt, who was then still in the south of France. When she arrived at Port-Bou months later, she sought Benjamin's grave in vain. 'It was not to be found, his name was not written anywhere.' Yet Frau Garland had, according to her report, bought a grave for him in September for five years. Hannah Arendt described the place: 'The cemetery faces a small bay directly overlooking the Mediterranean; it is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. It is by far one of the most beautiful spots I have seen in my life". Many years later, in the cemetery that Hannah Arendt had seen, a grave with Benjamin's name scrawled on wooden enclosure was being shown to visitors. The photographs before me clearly indicate that this grave, which is completely isolated and utterly separate from the actual burial places, is an invention of the cemetery attendants, who in considertaion og the number of inquired wanted to assure themselves of a tip. Visitors who where there have told they had the same impression. Certainly the spot is beautiful, but the grave is apocryphal...
Hannah Arendt on Benjamin
"Dusk will come again sometime.
Night will come down from the stars.
We will rest our outstretched arms
In the nearnesses, in the distances.
Out of the darkness sound softly
Small archaic melodies. Listening,
Let us wean ourselves away,
Let us at last break ranks.
Distant voices, sadnesses nearby.
Those are the voices and these the dead
Whom we have sent as messengers
Ahead, to lead us into slumber."
-"Walter Benjamin", poem of 1940
...Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about...
"The main thing is to learn how to think crudely. Crude thinking, that is the thinking of the great"-Brecht
"An understanding of Kafka's production involves, among other things, the simple recognition that he was a failure" (Benjamin)
...One day earlier Benjamin would have got through without any trouble; one day later the people in Marseilles would have known that for the time being it was impossible to pass through Spain. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible...
"Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with this other he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor" -Kafka
...It was the secularized version of the ancient Jewish belief that those who learn the Torah of the Talmud, that is, God's Law, were the true elite of the people and should not be bothered with so vulgar an occupation as making money or working for it...
...Running start for suicides, as though he were obbeying an oder that says 'you have to earn your grave'...
...It was a though shortly before its disappearance the figure of the homme de lettres was destined to show itself once more in the fullness of its possibilities, although -or, possible, because -it had lost its material basis in such a catastrophic way, so that the purely intellectual passion which makes this figure so lovable might unfold all its most telling and impressive possibilities...
...They fought against Jewish society because it would not permit them to live in the world as it happened to be, without illusions....
"Does Karl Kraus stand at the threshold of a new age? Alas, by no means. He stands at the threshold of the Last Judgement" (Benjamin)
...Walter Benjamin knew that the break in the tradition and the loss of authority which occured in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he has to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmisibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arised a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of 'peace of mind', the mindless peace of complacency...
...This discovery of the modern function of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus, was born out of the despair -not the despair of a past that refuses to throw its light on the future, and lets the human mind wander in darkness as in Tocqueville, but out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy it; hence their power is not strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy...
In a letter from Benjamin:
"A report from Vienna dated summer 1939, saying that the local gas company had stopped supplying gas to the Jews. The gas consumption of the Jewish population involves a loss for the gas company, since the biggest consumers were the ones who did not pay their bills. The Jews used the gas especially for committing suicide".
...The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d'etre in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage...
...For Benjamin to quote is to name, and naming rather than speaking, the word rather than the sentence, brings truth to light. As one may read in the preface to the Origin of German Tragedy, Benjamin regarded truth as an exclusively acoustic phenomenon: Not Plato but Adam, who gave things their names, was to him, the father of philosophy....
Franz Rosenzweig:
"There is no remedy for death; not even health. A healthy man, however, has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets himself be carried away in mortal fear. In health, even death comes at the proper time. Health is in good terms with Death. It knows that when the grim reaper comes he will remove his stone mask and catch the flickering torch from the anxious and weary and disappointed hands of Brother Life; it knows that he will dash it on the ground and extinguish it, but it also knows that only then the full brilliance of the nocturnal sky will brightly glow. It knows that it will be accepted into the open arms of Death. Life's eloquent lips are put to silence and the eternally Taciturn One will speak: 'Do you finally recognize me? I am your brother'."
Guilel's Passagen
Paris: My trip through Paris... personal notes, pictures and comments. 08-10/16-10 2003.
"Thus as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. This statement to Max Brod really contains Kafka's hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity" (Benjamin)
Guilel's answer: "There's an infinite amount of love, just not for us"
'I am the moss in the wall
You are the cedar
And in you the leaves never fall
And thus there's nothing else I can say
Other than remain attached to the wall
And to hope that perhaps
My day will come as well
To become a florishing cedar'
-Poem to Leo, on ocassion of the Buchlein.
"This song reminds me of you and K. I think this is why you seemed so magical
when I saw you both together for the first time.
A song by Charles Aznavour"
Je vous parle d'un temps
Que les moins de vingt ans
Ne peuvent pas connaître
Montmartre en ce temps-là
Accrochait ses lilas
Jusque sous nos fenêtres
Et si l'humble garni
Qui nous servait de nid
Ne payait pas de mine
C'est là qu'on s'est connu
Moi qui criait famine
Et toi qui posais nue
La bohème, la bohème
Ça voulait dire on est heureux
La bohème, la bohème
Nous ne mangions qu'un jour sur deux
Dans les cafés voisins
Nous étions quelques-uns
Qui attendions la gloire
Et bien que miséreux
Avec le ventre creux
Nous ne cessions d'y croire
Et quand quelque bistro
Contre un bon repas chaud
Nous prenait une toile
Nous récitions des vers
Groupés autour du poêle
En oubliant l'hiver
La bohème, la bohème
Ça voulait dire tu es jolie
La bohème, la bohème
Et nous avions tous du génie
Souvent il m'arrivait
Devant mon chevalet
De passer des nuits blanches
Retouchant le dessin
De la ligne d'un sein
Du galbe d'une hanche
Et ce n'est qu'au matin
Qu'on s'asseyait enfin
Devant un café-crème
Epuisés mais ravis
Fallait-il que l'on s'aime
Et qu'on aime la vie
La bohème, la bohème
Ça voulait dire on a vingt ans
La bohème, la bohème
Et nous vivions de l'air du temps
Quand au hasard des jours
Je m'en vais faire un tour
A mon ancienne adresse
Je ne reconnais plus
Ni les murs, ni les rues
Qui ont vu ma jeunesse
En haut d'un escalier
Je cherche l'atelier
Dont plus rien ne subsiste
Dans son nouveau décor
Montmartre semble triste
Et les lilas sont morts
La bohème, la bohème
On était jeunes, on était fous
La bohème, la bohème
Ça ne veut plus rien dire du tout
"Simultaneity – Man is a simultaneous being, past and future exist in him at
the same time. Memory and hope live within man contradicting each other,
colliding, creating ever lasting conflict within the human mind and soul. At
first there was only the now, the near past and the near future. As myth
faded away and history replaced it, man could look into it's own past and
remember. Remembrance brought him to envisage a future, a distant future; it
gave him the ability to hope. In the process of looking backward and looking
forward man forgot to watch his steps, he lost the ability to exist in the
'now'. Today we feel the now as moments of exhilaration, of transcendence,
we call them spiritual moments, when we feel in 'our bodies' and we 'connect
to God' yet these moments are rare and one may live a lifetime without
experiencing the 'now'."
Guilel on Benjamin, letter to Leo
"I don't know how to love. I never knew it probably, not since the age of 16.
I don't know how to react to people touching me, seeking to give me comfort.
Yet I am so filled with love, with the desire to love, to be touched, to be
loved. It is as you told me Kafka said about hope; there is so much love
around but just not for me."
"You are right, you are not
my friend. You challenge me, you give me inspiration, and you have an
amazing amount of naiveté in you, without realizing it. You gave me for the
first time since his death hope, the world you exposed me to have filled me
with fires I have believed until now to be extinguished."
"I feel I have disappointed you"
"It's late and i have been sitting for quite a while in fron of my mail, as i
did yesterday. I cannot seem to succeed in writing a word. The feeling is
desperation and anxiety combined. I don't understand it."
Leo's reply:
'There's no motif of concern here, unless the painting had been sketched in advance, in which case the most significantly dignified device is surrender. But this is not what usually our doctors recommend, for one should always memorably lose any possible confrontation and all the more so whenever a rift arise in which no enmities are freely vouched in the air, yet only a "theosophos teutonicus" might be so keen on producing such advise, because at times the practical wisdom of the world is of too much consolation so that one would feel glad if he could die a death every week as to receive so much, but so much compassion. Yet not being Christian enough for this enterprise and rather taking pleasure in the visions of Hell I have no advise to produce in this treatise that could not be sought after in music or in the simple entanglements of lust and quotidianite. But I will not give up so easily, I will reproduce a letter from one of our readers; in case you find it useful to any extent be so kind not to notify us. The combination of desperation and anxiety is the most traditional symptom of truth and of understanding; and when not, it is always the beginning as the political theorists would say about what we believers would call "creation stories" and the simple man just "myth". If this does not work, please call our 1-800-confession line.
Letter from a reader:
Princess:
I try to write some poems that could speak about all those interwoven stories we have but it's impossible, I can't go beyond some very banal statements. I can only speak about all that whilst thinking philosophy, while encountering the greatest minds and demolishing their arguments, through the passion of logic and reason - trying to find a definition that will satisfy our experiences and find those places for love and life in scholarship. I think I will never be able to really speak about you or G. in poetry, unless I'm very hurt from the world; otherwise I can only speak to both of you in pure thought, in hermeneutics, in demolishing critiques in which I speak contra myself and see my masks changing into one another before my eyes. Heidegger and Aristotle claim that poetry in its relationship to truth is very close to philosophy, that is springs forth from the same sources... and this is what I hold against Agnes Heller and her social import in philosophy. When I discover that the time is breaking apart in my hands with all the concepts that contain human life, the whole of my raw materials... only then I can truly communicate with you both. Even when the poetry works if at all it is only the key to the front door before the gate, but the door is always locked even though you're both inside. I can never leave, you can never come in, you can never leave, I can never come in. Then I have a claustrophobic feeling and that draws me to the most extreme solitude and upon its fall the disappointment and the emptiness in which the fullness of my thinking finds its counterparts. Only this radically pure thought can encompass the truth of our experiences and this doesn't belong to me alone, it belongs to what the Zeitgeist of our age is demanding... in that sense our lives are lived in the plurality of the company of people, which is a political beginning in every possible respect but it doesn't always work. Sometimes the company is also a heading toward death, a fear that grows into love and a love that grows into fear. It isn't pure madness, it's a logic so complex that becomes unreadable and only in that labyrinth I can find myself and meet you and him as well. As you wrote me yesterday "O yes I will dear Leo, denn ich kann nicht anders- because I somehow know your language von innen heraus, it seems as if I'm walking through the empty rooms of a house where I remember exactly where all furniture and things used to be, yet not there anymore".
Leo.'
"Because I trust and truly love you....
Please, I beg of you, ask me for an advice or just a shoulder if you need
one, I am here for you, truly, more then you think, and i am not such a
fragile person that i wouldn't know what to do.... with you, with this
place, or with the world..."
Passagen of Yussuf l'autre and Leo
"It is something about your humour and "ernst" at the same time that I like.,
I see this bitterboesen sarcasm is a means to take a little glance into some Abgrund.. maybe, a little further than without ."-Y.
For Benjamin this is exactly the moment of redemption, the "absolute present" of Rosenzweig and Kafka, the moment of the event which stands both outside time but within its own limits: "Sun will not overstep his measures; otherwise the Erynies, ministers of Justice, will find him out". Redemption happens in the present, it is an "event", a present event that "takes place", and altogether constitutes both a story of creation and a story of revelation; "For being has the immanent meaning or revelation as well as of creation. Revelation is the creation of reason". At this point one can return to the burrow and mend the method of "access", the way through. The fox has pointed out the importance of the "how", insofar as it is, of things in opposition to the "what" which lives in sempiternal anxiety because in the moment of its reflection, insofar as it is, it is already lost and irretrievable: "In Jedem Falle gilt: wenn wir in bezug auf die Philosophie fragen: Was ist das?, dann fragen wir eine ursprüngliche greichische Frage".L. on Benjamin, to Guilel and Barbara"I'm falling into a state where nothing seems real again, and I cry a lot about this, it s a lack of reality about me, and even when I read, it meakes me even more like not being able to grasp reality, or what is present .. outside.
But how can it be here? I don t understand / i would love and like to be a person who is always with people, busy with many work to do , and responsibilities, and standing with the feets on the ground, not the opposite like me, who is always falling into pieces and then recognises being fixed up upsite down." -Y.
"I think... I wont be able to tell anybody in words what you meaant to me, and the time we spent,
I will only be able trough paintings,
tell guilel that I read his poem over and over" -Y.
"There's so much I have to tell you, but I am without
any calm moment"- Y.
"L. dear,
i dedicate this to you... ( as you know, I dedicate
all parties in my life to you, as they are all simple
reminders of our Wirkliche Feste!)
it is a drawing of 50 x 40 cm, i printed it on glass,
the so called stage oder room is a photoprint of a
jerusalem hotel.
The important point is, that the glass plate is in a
gap of 2 cm away from the image, so it is always just
the shadow of the drawing touching the room. And this
is why it is never the same, as the light changes.
I m sorry it is impossible to display this on a
photography.
At the moment I did 7 of them ( it was fucking
expensive to print on glass) but.. whatever... it s
all about Our PARTIES!
and i will call u cause there s so much to tell.
Eveline was here and it was all sooooo amazing to meet
her...
i wrote u some sms ,
i want to know how u are, i heard u had quite
exasparating and dangerous times, that left their
marks and cuts on you...
ts, ts, ts...
well, i just want to send you this one Party of
Jerusalem" -Y.
"There's so much I have to tell you, but I am without
any calm moment"- Y.
"L. dear,
i dedicate this to you... ( as you know, I dedicate
all parties in my life to you, as they are all simple
reminders of our Wirkliche Feste!)
it is a drawing of 50 x 40 cm, i printed it on glass,
the so called stage oder room is a photoprint of a
jerusalem hotel.
The important point is, that the glass plate is in a
gap of 2 cm away from the image, so it is always just
the shadow of the drawing touching the room. And this
is why it is never the same, as the light changes.
I m sorry it is impossible to display this on a
photography.
At the moment I did 7 of them ( it was fucking
expensive to print on glass) but.. whatever... it s
all about Our PARTIES!
and i will call u cause there s so much to tell.
Eveline was here and it was all sooooo amazing to meet
her...
i wrote u some sms ,
i want to know how u are, i heard u had quite
exasparating and dangerous times, that left their
marks and cuts on you...
ts, ts, ts...
well, i just want to send you this one Party of
Jerusalem" -Y.
"His Messianism retains the impossibility and the spirit of the times, a rather funny pessimism that laughs about itself and in doing so retains its faith altogether. Because one simply can't give up, when as in Lasker-Schueler the boundaries between one's life and philosophy or poetry are no longer there and the world is experienced like Friedrich Gentz, "Gentz gave himself to the world immediately and directly, and it consumed him. His hedonism was only the most radical way open to him to let the world consume him"[36]. No gaps are left in between God, man and the world in the most radical form of bridging the gap between past and future: Living eternally in the present moment, which the time has lost sight of, crashing right before the unreflective vertigo. It is this absolute present and not any glorious past or distant Utopian future what leaves the door open for the Messiah." L. on Benjamin, to Guilel and Barbara
"Im Versuch des damals
Fast Jeweilig, stünde ich
In der äußerten barlosigkeit
Aber im Evaskostüm gleichzeitig
Unewiges, durchschnittlich
Und nachdem, hintereinander
Den unheimlichen Augenblick
Eines Nachbild je stellt im Unsterblichkeit vor
Zusammen noch immer weites
Mit den Stimmen der Vergänglichkeit
Die sich befindet nicht, im Verständis der Zeit
Sondern von vielfältigen und glücken Vergessen
Manchmal gleichmäßig schändlich
Noch Sittlich, verwundert.
Deine Herrlichkeit klingt jemals weiblich
Lakonisch trägisch, niemals rein oder wirklich
In einem Vorbei seines eigenes Vorlauf
Die Jeweiligkeit baut einen sichaussprechen
Unheimliche Ereignis
Gemeinlich, der weiß um seinen Tod
Er sendt eine Karte mit dem Post
"Gebrauchanweisung:Freundliche Grüßen"
Eine Verwandlung." L. to Guilel
"My dear Katharina
The clear evening has a light that shines but doesn't talk at all, it's seemly a picture of our earthly life from a vantage point in the universe that happens or unfolds in the instant just before the redemption. If you would share this scene with me, you would understand it makes the perfect painting, the most beautiful painting you could ever think of because it presents everything we've talked about without representing anything at all.
It's a very everyday scene which takes place right before love, right before creation as in the Biblical sense, a story of origins. The place isn't spectacular or evocative, but it is a house like one of those in which you and me have never lived, everything seems to be comfortably in place as though arranged by the conspicuous hand of a motherly care or at least of guilt it comes with. The room could be anybody else's but it's not and that's the source of the amazing mystery.
Yet this is only the sketch, the preambule before the real ecsatic thread. It was a dinner, similar to the Last Supper in a way yet not quite the same. It was in a present tense so absolute that language had been rapturedly taken away from me and I could only speak little "talk" about anything that comes to mind. An instant soup very different from the ambar we had in my provisorium, rather chalky and smooth but so uncannily "homely". Then a perfectly fried omelette (and remember Agnes' dictum: "it's better not to smash the omelette") and fresh cut vegetables on a plate. Everything dressed with a transparent distancing and hiding, no honest dishes or glasses of wine, everything furnished with plain water and some brief moments of silence together with an almost whispered conversation without any other-worldly meaning at all. Nothing heavy, as it were the day when Tereza and Thomas died and right before Tomas' son would think that his father wanted the kingdom of God on earth.
It's so different from our hotel freedoms and storage houses. But there's very little feeling and perhaps me being uncomfortable about it is what makes sense of it all because in a way I'm so totally unexpecting that if the painting wouldn't be complete at all I wouldn't be disappointed in anyway. I sit on the floor as though untimely mourning before my time and write non sense in my journal with the hope of understanding myself a little better but the air is charged with a smell of distraction directed toward the man in question that can only prove a rather dietetic form of confusion.
But somehow I insist this is the sight of our earthly life in the minute before the redemption that keeps the Messiah from coming everytime anew. In a way I'd like to escape very much and meet you again for the same reasons as before but in a way not. In a way I want to be drunk from this nearing that distances reality so much, at least as we know it: in the most extreme possibility of the consumption. This is perhaps the only form of life where the chair of the Messiah can remain always empty, because it's so terribly abstracted from itself and from anything else that I find myself at odds trying to describe the violent and loving feeling of philosophy coming home I feel right now, because I know it's only one another departure that leaves the finite in order to know itself and to lose itself to be more precise.
Somehow this is not boring because it feels me with terrible fear, the fear of the known and the found. Yet the time is already broken to start with, because no events can be perceived by the searching eye until they crash with the eye itself in a repair that resembles already their passing away more than their coming into being. It's not called happiness or a Hegelian reconciliation, maybe the genius of Augustine would be able to find the contradiction that allows one to lie and hide all the truth away from the world, lest we risk that it shall be found in its barest nudity and then somehow no one would want anything from this world as it is. Then painting and thinking would make no sense at all, there would be no possible creation history and therefore no possible freedom and in turn modernity would pass from being an illusion into becoming the foundation of all possible world, a Christian vale of tears. Which it is at the same time, only that from our searching eye it is the tear what keeps the redemption always a minute late, what makes this world possible at all.
Suddenly I cease to think about my death and without altogether embracing my life or myself to life I can keep myself a minute away from my death so that if it would reach me, no one could say death found me in the wrong moment as in the story of King David in the Talmud. That moment of death, always untimely should be the only turning point in which the actual transformation can take place and "happen" properly. Otherwise we're condemned to this kind of everyday life that shines next to Gillel's knowing smile, and because we have a very extreme kind of freedom we can hardly experience it. It's different because as Agnes said in regard to Genesis, the philosophical grief starts as soon as you discover the time and in using the language you've lost the time again forever. The painting is perfect, that's why it cannot be happy. Oh untimely disappointment, sweeter than death and fresher than bay leaves, continuous revolt and revolution. Yet alive, for the time being. Departure time, rapture time, impossible time." L. to Y.
"To my painter
"I hear the roaring and the roasting and I know that it is I"
-Gillian Rose
I thought I had seen me in the roaring
On a Friday night, over tears
When I was returned,
Turned back, turned away too
It had thick walls that unveiled things
All the more beautiful as I moved
But the path had been only broken then
So that in the despairing pain of my rib
Of my leg
I can see the middle just breaking apart
Continuously and in an ecstasic festival
Of disagreements with the others
But with you, only whiskeys and ryes
You know my death from close by
Have heard her smile too
But fool yourself not!
That's not at all the end
And not even the broken middle
But a paving way moving toward
That unrecognition of the mistake
Of the failure
That contains a whole life
Only for a while
And then there's a broken middle
With names and letters
Never answered perhaps
Unsorted telephone calls
And a misery of such degree
That can never discussed
Nor you could ever paint it
And at that I'm your artist
The painter of your images
The seer
That breaks the middle paths
Never reaching the broken at all
Everytime he cuts my flesh
Into tiny little pieces of delight
I feel my body ache more strongly
And I enter the mourning again
Whereby you can be no companion at all
At most your witnessing
Is all what I can take
Your care
Which is only time
Temporality, language
And altogether dead nature too!
But this is my will
To will this toll even more fiercely than I wish my death
When the chips turn adverse
And no communication is possible
Between us and the Gods
Between the arts and us
Shall this hurt too much
I should give up
And untimely
Before my time
Yet but never
Before I make sure
That the Chair of Redemption remains empty
And that he, only he
Awaits nothing
So that he could at least embrace the world
The only possible honour
Of the passing away
In which thinking makes sense at all
And in the company of others
Moments of eternity
In Jerusalem
The only eternity available to us
That crude reality
That rips the flesh
And trades pleasure for salvation
This roaring I hear
And what I see
Is not him
But that it is I
Distancing even more." L. to Y.
Conversation:
L.
I'm so beautifully depressed, just reading G.R. and soaking so completely in the delight of desperate mourning which is at times the beginning of a new life.
J.
I'm listening to Mahler's "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen". Unknown singer. Drawing this Protestant garden on and on, imagining that all life began in the garden. Musing about all the parties I had in my life before...
Discussing Blücher:
Blücher on the study of philosophy: "You can do it only if you know that the most important thing in your life would be to succeed in this and the second most important thing, almost as important, to fail in precisely this."
Y:
Because there can be just there two choices! To keep them in mind... Succeeding then always depends on the outer world somehow, if they are ahead enough for your thoughts. To fail? Painting, for example, means always failing, never succeeding. To know this gives me always the strength to start a new painting.
L:
Bestimmt! Wahrheit wird niemals nach dem Zwielicht von Kunst und Philosophie darstellt zu habe. Nor noch Dichting köennte es erwarten, erfahren und darin gegründet zu sein. Kunst/Philosophie sind immer auf einem "moment of truth" angefangen und dann im darstellungsbegriff the moment ist schon durchgekommen geworden and you return to the Schöpfungsaugenblick again. Es wird niemals folglich vollständig ausgebaut, in der meinung von Goethe und Rilke.
"The chief fallacy is to believe that Truth is a result which comes at the end of a thought-process. Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought, thinking is always result-less. That is the difference between "philosophy" and science: Science has results, philosophy never. Thinking starts after an experience of truth has struck home, so to speak. The difference between philosophers and other people is that the former refuse to let go, but that they are the only receptacles of truth. This notion that truth is the result of thought is very old and goes back to ancient classical philosophy, possibly to Socrates himself. If I am right and if it a fallacy, then it probably is the oldest fallacy of Western philosophy. You can detect it in almost all definitions of truth, and especially in the traditional one of "aedequatio rei et intellectus" [the conformity of the intellect to the thing known]. Truth, in other words, is not "in" thought but to use Kant's language, the condition for the possibility of thinking. It is both, beginning and a priori." -Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy
Y:
But it's good and important then to have certain skills like dialogue, keeping friends, and so on. Creating ein geistiges umfeld, so to say practising reality.
L:
To keep those channels open (friendship, dialogue, discourse) means to leave a possibilityin my opinion to alter an everyday life that can never be falsified, just like philosophies and works of art, an act of ewige Schöpfung.
Else Lasker-Schueler, 1943
and from one only bone: Jerusalem.
I promenade as through mausoleums -
Of stones is our Holy City.
So rest the stones on the beds of their dead Sea
In place of watery silks that played herein: They come and die away.
They glaze into the wayfarer with a callous reasoning -
And he drowns in her glazing night.
I am angry, that I cannot be overwhelmed.
If you would come...
Enshrouded in a wintercoat -
And would do away with the dusk hours of my day -
My arm would frame you, a rather auxiliary image of the holy.
Like once when I suffered in the darkness of my heart -
Therein both your eyes: blue clouds.
They delivered me from my turbid mind.
If you would come...-
To the land of the ancestors -
You would exhort me like a little boy:
Jerusalem - come to know Resurrection!
She hails us
The living flag of the "only God",
Greening hands, that sow the odes of life. (L.'s translation)
L's trans. of Zelda's "Mephiboshet"
"Your flickering eyes
Small birds suckling the nectars.
When you wept
The king hearkened not.
When you fell
The world did not return
To void-and-chaos.
Mephiboshet, you dreamt
Of a more innocent friendship.
You sickened at the wisdom
Of the ancient serpent,
O Son of Jonathan!"
"Lastly the reality behind all this is that I share in my own personal life Taubes' most absolute rejection of this world as it is, and only in trying to reverse this situation and this feeling I can make myself at home in a world wherein I remain but a philosopher. Only in this process I can understand the human condition much more than I do in conversations, in letter to people I love or in the experience of art; I share with Benjamin and Taubes the "catastrophes of history" and somehow am beguiled by the lovelessness and the hopelessness available in the form of that Benjaminean infinite amount of hope but not for us, I feel this so strongly and only in speaking contra myself in these matters I can make sense of my life. Today as I spoke to my father on the phone we had one of those typical chit-chats about my life and then suddenly he asked me "Why can't you have a normal boyfriend? Normal friends? Lead a normal life for God's sake?" and unsurprisingly enough I had very little to back my arguments with, the answers to those questions I can produce only in philosophy, because it is the only language available I found to make my protest heard, my protest of the everyday which I so forcefully reject. My melancholy is my experience of that philosophical truth, of the thrownness and the bewilderment before the raw materials of existence, it is the only happiness available to me from within the womb of my struggles, of my failures and my tragic sense is the counterpart of the Protestant happiness that my childhood lived through. I truly feel this is a loveless and Godless world, but I refuse to believe it, I entirely refuse to believe it and in those dark moments when the chips are down and I experience the failures of wisdom, love and life only philosophy and the figure of the Occident come to my relief. My faith is one of un-faith, and its language very southern Germanic and urgent, its symbols are all Jewish and its representation is a form of truth that blurs the limits of philosophy and life and that wouldn't be possible without the companionship of those other loners thinking out there, only in their companionship I can embrace and live that humanitas for which philosophy is my only language, and my only protest." L. to Sandra
"But the concept of the private doesn't entail only individual privacy, individuality... but in general terms it is applied to institutions and functions, the private is part of the public and it does not necessarily lives 'hiding', but rather and only 'not in the public', meaning that its goods are not common properties to all, even though my life is a private matter and I might freely decide whether to take it or not whenever I temptatively attempt to 'take' other person's life I am subjected to the public punishment. There's 'privacy' in my 'home', albeit this can be also a 'publicly-owned' location, I am in 'public' whenever outing with a lover, but then I experience 'private conversations'. Here I introduce two additional concepts to the discussion on 'private' and 'public'; namely 'intimacy' and 'anonimity'. The private realm is composed of manifold institutions that assure public life, but in these institutions usually private men are rather anonymous than public and in a romantic relationship I have more 'intimacy' than I have 'privacy', after all friends might always come by in the middle of the night and yet I can't have intimacy with myself. As an anonymous person I am not a private, for I might engage in multiple 'casual stands' without divulging my name or real marital status but I can never be 'anonymous' among my friends, therefore as an 'anonymous' person I am always in public, while 'anonymous' relationships are not necessarily 'intimate'. Intimacy and anonimity are two terms whose relationship is not as dialectical as that in between public and private, and in fact because the blurry differentiation between public and private most of our everyday experiences are turned into intimate or anonymous - in both cases we can't attain them by ourselves, we need the company of others.
...There's no love in anonimity, and the tragedy of the loss of the Self is that it has become the only concern of our age and therefore the least useful of all, because that 'self' remains quite anonymous and is usually not a good partner for conversation nor in the company of other neither in solitude. The Self has replaced the coherence of metaphysics and theology to provide a model for a 'home', but it is quite an anonymous character and cannot be held responsible for anything before the political institutions, it doesn't have a public or private face. Its only ground is freedom from everything else, and that's exactly where the coherence can never be attained, because this foundation is not a narrative or a creation story, it is not an assurance of mortality or immortality, it is not a dialectical dialogue between life and death nor a hermeneutic tool. On the recovery of plurality (in the sense that even the lives of the saints are lived in the company of others, as Augustine pointed out) depends the possibility for the individuality, and while only extreme individuals have been proved to have a 'taste' in the Kantian sense for weightful decisions in the realms of ethics and politics this is of very little use if I live in a world where I stand all alone by myself and cannot see 'me', because after all the work of art has no effect in the world if I am condemned to be the only spectator. Political philosophy isn't much different, it needs a world which I can't provide myself, I need to come into it and then just as naturally leave it, and of which I'm free to think in whichever way it pleases me, but my intuition and faith is that if I understand this world to be the Augustinian desert or that endless 'hotel room' rather than the best of all possible worlds, I would certainly prefer to stay anonymous rather than public or private, and await the next world." L. to Sandra
'When I die, do not scream and weep at my grave, I'm not there.... I sleep' -Else Lasker-Schüler
'But we, my beloved companion, have life, useless hope, true friends and fire consuming our souls... the most important thing I learnt from you and that has brought me much peace is: contradictions are the only way we can understand life' -Guilel
'I know that unrest, it decomposes everything... I believe it's that which feeds one with so much urgency in life, but if one doesn't tend it properly, it does kill' - Y.
Conversation:
J.
Ah, les gens là... Mon A..... Où est ce que toi? You're always in my heart, yes -always, nowhere else... I'm writing you this letter, it's difficult for me, words never like me too much, my tongue humpelt immer, I'm just living a strange life, seeking only passion and crazy laughter, living in an art-hospital....
Just listened sad music whole hours long, lying on bed, very tired, too tired to go to sleep, now I go to some bar in sperlgasse...
L.
My life is all about seeking this crazy passion and it makes me so sad that life always fails at me in precisely that, the only thing I want... maybe it's only for that reason that I keep trying everyday, failing everyday, only so I'm able to live.... 'there's an infinite amount of love but just not for us'; who if not him to have understood the whole of Benjamin?
I think Eveline and G. are the only people who understood Benjamin at all, or at least the way I did, that makes me feel so 'heimlich', but the 'heimlichkeit' is so urgent that the present becomes all fear, it kills... then the heimlichkeit becomes useless and unheimlich again in a way.
J.
It scares so badly as they're looking always for security, so living with no compromises means at the very essential point, to understand that there's no security, just empty air under your feet. Your concept is a philosophical concept in the most radical and brutal sense, as it allows no divisory lines between concept and life. A concept not only aesthetically, and because he loves you, he understands the concept even if he cannot live it.
L.
Sure, but the break of the boundaries between life and thought is all what has been ever wanted from thought and life themselves; when they see it come alive, they feel at home in the world again but soon enough they also discover that this 'heimlichkeit' also kills, but this 'death' is the truth of living (in the ontological sense). Then the burgeoise consciousness advises one to escape but it's not entirely possible, so that one returns again in order to live but not for long, as he knows nothing will make sense after that. 'Socrates laughed once and he never wept'
J. on Eveline:
'It was so amazing as it is always... to meet Eveline, and especially to meet her in Vienna! She is the diva and all the others are so poor, because they are just trabanten of others... And she is the sun and moon in persona, and who else can understand this unheimlichkeit?
And who else understands what this Dringlichkeit means? The Dringlichkeit of gelebt zu haben (having lived)...
Die anderen - sie kennen schöne Wörte, aber sie kennen nicht die abgründe die zwischen ihnen liegen (the others - they know beautiful words, but they don't know the abysses that lie in between them).'
"I want to go to Palestine with the boy. Maybe if he's with me I can really bear everything. I know how miserable it would make him, but I can hardly bear things with him as they're. He's on the edge of things, so anxious... has been through so much toll and bad health, but all the same... things could be different than they are.
The dettachment would show him to which extent Germany is completely lost for us, but if I bring myself to the point of that decision I think there's really no way to return. Life as it is now had very little charm for me if alone, but still I must follow through even if he doesn't make up his mind. It can't be that good for the kid either, to grow up in such conditions. An unhappy mother can never aspire be, a good educator.
Sometimes I want to be dead... when I think about it, that I must go on.
I love him so much, and he loves me no less... but the expression of his love is so different from mine. So soon I turn into despair and my love, can already alienate him so much at the same time that it makes my own life so difficult to bear while I can only lament about the whole affair. Until everything comes out or I just suffocate. Then suddenly we just go through it and I realize that everything is just OK, but such agony.... these agonies!
I wish, that he would think about me a little more sometimes - why do I have evermore this need, this need to afford him some glee? But in the main it all has to do with education. He has the education of my parents, that kind of idiosincracy that makes him so embarrassed of the simple things, like sending flowers to each other. I'm so overflown with feelings for him, I want to lay the whole world in front of him... but this is how it goes, whoever loves more, suffers all the more so." Journal entry, Mascha Kaléko, 1938
"Dear Mill, I thank you for your beautiful card, it is here the time: Rain (Regen) but one day sunshine 20 grad, other day the sea from the sky. Here now all good. We all people very good, the Englishmen all gentlemen. I have momentan picture Austellung. A gentleman here has given me extra money for a travel through Palestine. Still one moment I go to Baghdad and Damascus and Beirut and one day to Cairo. One day from here for a Pfund to travel. But I'm very sorry for the world. All the men which dead now. Write soon again, yours, Yussuf"-Else Lasker Schüler
Conversation:
K.
"Soll ich nach Jerusalem kommen Dir helfen die Briefe zu übersetzen? Yussuf l'autre"
"I was impressed and touched by your last article of den reisen of Princess of Thebes. I felt so touched and confused, because I felt this burning in head, heart and fingernails you must have had, when having those jewel letters in your hand. And this unmittelbare herzrasende erlebnis I recognize in these lines"
L.
"You don't know what it was like to have those letters in my hands, it was like discovering America. Like knowing the Jerusalem of the Prinzesin like only Leo can know it. It was recognizing myself in the dark eyes of a German Jew who left those letters just for me. You know what I mean?"
K.
"I know as far as I can even if I'll never be a German and Jew, but my eyes are dark and sparkling enough to know and recognize myself in those dark beautiful sad eyes of Else. As she is the old woman and still remains Yussuf, auch wenn längst alles verloren ist"
L.
"Oy I'm at the bars again! The night won't end up well!"
K.
"My nights never end up well, how beautiful that finally one gets tired or never.... But which night WANTS to end WELL?"
L.
"A night that ends up well is a night in the world of Pavel and Ralf. I'm in this totally crowded bar yet so much alone with the music, isn't it so beautiful? Plus I'm spending my last money in alcohol and I feel so free running my own excess show. After finding those letters I made Jewish history already, with my own fingers! Nothing can matter now"
OPERA FINALE:
L.
How was the exposition?
J.
Oy oy... I dedicated everything to you. You're already famous! Because all I'm telling in my drawings is a secret that only we know. I don't care if they don't understand the Wirklichkeit of our encounter.
L.
What? I'm in such gloom that your words brought dry tears to my eyes in a warm night when all failures of the present weight upon me so heavily.
