Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons
Angelus Novus
[Paul Klee (Swiss, 1897–1940), 1920
India ink, colored chalk, and brown wash on paper, 318 x 242 mm.
Israel Museum, Jerusalem (via Gershom Scholem via Walter Benjamin)]
Here
In the dream two heads bowed, sullen, silent, dour over an image instantly recognizable as a grave in Pompeii. The two lovers mourned the two lovers there. At the threshold of the dream, where dream coincides with waking, mourning turned self-referential as epochs of history receded back down into archetypal, chthonic realms. Real death urged the dreamer dreaming, the lovers lost, & the two still alive toward a momentary, harmonious joy, only grasped at in language here.
Walter Benjamin's Central Park
I.
Perhaps the recent stay in NYC with only The Dakota standing between our apartment & Central Park, or by the consistent perspective marginality offers, what with recent attempts to house over forty-years worth of my papers, I’m drawn toward the utterly tragic circumstances literary theorist Walter Benjamin found himself in in Denmark & France from 1938-40. He’s got his eye on New York. Hears Death in the form of Gestapo jackboots. Gets interned as a foreign national at an outdoor stadium in Paris. Argues against the threat to cancel his small stipend from the Institute of Social Research at Columbia University, writing to Max Horkheimer, that the latter did not fathom the difference between reduction for his New York colleagues & cessation for him in Paris, “We are all isolated individuals. And for the isolated individual the perspective opened by your letter, with its terrifying earnestness, overshadows all other plans.” But he continues to read & write. Before leaving Paris, in hopes of getting to America, he leaves much of his archive with Georges Bataille, fellow writer & librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The last work to be located there was found in 1981, a tract he’d been writing in 1938-39, what editors of the four-volume Selected Writings published by Harvard call, “the most advanced drafts & notes for the partially completed Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism,” also known as Central Park.
II.
Imagine, Central Park. He tailors his findings on Baudelaire writing during his Time in Paris by attempting to apply the same principles to New York City, where friends & colleagues had offered to find him work & an apartment near Central Park. One of his initial correspondences was to define Baudelaire’s “Modernity” as giving expression to extreme spontaneity, which he refers to, after Jules Laforgue first broached it as Baudelaire’s “Americanism.” This does my heart good, seeing Baudelaire as the father of the prose poem, & knowing it is, first & foremost, at least for me, an act of revolt. I continue to hear jackboots of Death haunting Benjamin, hoping to house his archive & find a job in New York. He sees New York as one of the great cities of the world, which possesses a “labyrinthine character” with “an image of the Minotaur at its center.” “…he [the Minotaur] brings death to the individual… is the image of the deadly power he embodies…” (His ambivalence to the chance of ever making it to New York?) Benjamin points out the facts & obsessions of Baudelaire’s Time as the fetishization of commodity, prostitution, & the marketplace. Adds here, for his own purposes, again, in Central Park, “Emigration as a key to the big city.” Are his Columbia University colleagues listening? Toward the end of the 46 loose-leaf sheets that make up Central Park, Benjamin asks almost rhetorically regarding Baudelaire’s belief or non-belief in progress, “Walt Whitman?” The editors point out that additionally, in preparation for his ill-fated trip to America, Walter Benjamin reads William Faulkner’s novel, Light in August.
FURTHER STUDY:
Walter Benjamin
Max Horkheimer
