after Walter Benjamin (2003)
I
Let me move my pieces,
or let my god do it for me,
a Deep Junior or Kasparov
hidden inside the chess board –
theology and theocracy,
teleology and technocracy,
all in the service of history.
Let the people of the East
see my puppet in Turkish attire
move their pieces towards democracy,
while I lubricate the machinery
of government and prophet
for profit.
II
Weak Messianism nurtures our love for history;
all paths lead to the present,
and the future will lead there too.
We are the world
of past, present, and future.
The earth waited for our coming,
nurturing meaning;
it waits for our actions,
expectantly;
it sees our becoming,
and our fulfillment;
and whether it survives
or ends its revolving,
burning up amidst greenhouse gasses,
and other human excretions,
it will be fulfilled.
Such at least is the history.
Our image of happiness
is bound up with the image of redemption.
and our past is the path towards that redemption,
our autobiography –
mere hagiography.
III
A chronicler once foretold
that pigeons would nest in Trafalgar Square.
Amidst the memories of battles won
and the circus of a traffic jam,
the strangled roads of Tottenham’s courts,
and the strands of Victoriana
hanging from a marbled arch,
we will see gray, white, and black pigeons,
leaving their mark on historic pavement.
And on what day will we distinguish
among these things:
Nelson, Victoria, the British Museum –
all those past glories –
and these markings of flying rodents?
Assigning meaning is for Judgment Day,
though we will signify meanings
and other bird droppings,
in the meantime.
IV
Seek for food and clothing first, then
the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you.
– Hegel , 1807
Gods are born not in empty bellies,
though there they may gain some sustenance;
they are born in the knowledge of the full stomach,
in the satisfaction of material wants.
Gods provide for the starving,
opiates opine for the mind,
but this is all mere chiliasm,
despairing of all hope for material well-being,
unless the gods can make their own marks,
whereby a record or archive is constructed
in their memories.
Such gods are then real;
such gods are meaningful;
such gods are to be listened to,
are to be reckoned with,
in the course of human affairs,
in the house of human conflict.
Courage, humor, cunning and fortitude
will be manifest in their struggle.
Once recognized,
they will question every victory,
past and present,
of the rulers
– and their other gods.
As flowers turn towards the sun
by dint of secret heliotropism,
the past strives to turn toward a star
rising in the sky of history.
But which flowers will we see?
V
True history flits by.
The past can be seized
only as an image
which flashes up at the instant it is seen,
never to be seen again.
It is a photograph
captured on paper
but printed in invisible inks.
The historian opens her mouth
and the meaning of the ages
the preening of the sages
gets lost within her exhalation.
The listener turns back to his morning newspaper,
sips at a cup of coffee
and examines the morning crossword,
the mourning cross words,
and puzzled revelations.
VI
“What it really was,”
says Ranke,
“is the one thing needful.”
“If it really was,”
says the materialist,
“is the one thing doubtful.”
Danger will bring forth historic fact;
it will be there,
but invisible
without anxiety.
The need for the fact
will give it life,
and the fact will be needed
when the historian,
lying on an analyst’s chair
reaches for the causes
of his inner concern
his fear of conflict,
his search for community,
his yearning for some continuity.
Historian and historical agents
stand in awe of that danger,
fight for its narrative outlines
while staking claims for objectivity.
And who will win?
The historian will believe in eternal justice,
that he represents a Messiah,
that he is subduing an Antichrist,
and that he is losing.
Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy
if he should lose.
And, with a McCarthyite’s anxious flourish,
he notes that the enemy has never ceased
to be victorious.
VII
Consider the darkness and the great cold
In this vale which resounds with mystery.
– Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
Blot out the present
to reach the past,
so sayeth Fustel de Coulanges.
We must be sad
to resuscitate Carthage,
so sayeth Flaubert.
But with whom shall we empathize?
Will it not be the victors,
to whom go all the spoils
of history –
for whom we must spoil history.
Are we not surrounded by the inheritors:
the triumphal procession
of present rulers
stepping over those who are lying prostrate –
not even their victims,
but the unconsidered losers,
the eternally mysterious?
But there is no document of civilization
that is not at the same time
a document of barbarism,
and barbarism will taint,
will have a hold on
the transmitter – the historian.
And to free herself from barbarism
is a task of disassociation,
brushing history against the grain
and not for gain.
VIII
We live in a “state of emergency”
and we are taught that this is the exception
not the rule.
We got here through 9/11
when we could have been somewhere else
mere descendants from a Good War,
or a mistaken one,
continuing to live in the lap of luxury
without a care,
lapping up our innocence.
But the innocent sojourning
in the state of emergency
is fearful indeed!
What would a real state of emergency
look like,
when emergency is not considered emergency
but more of the same
in world historical terms?
Would it be the hungry finding food
and the shackled passing into freedom?
For, surely it will not be another despotic act,
another terroristic response?
as these are age old and tired metaphors
for emergency!
IX
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back,
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.
--Gerhard Scholem, “Gruss vom Angelus”
The people look skyward
seeking aid from above,
and the Angel of History
appears on the horizon
his eyes staring, mouth open
and wings spread,
while human catastrophes
are hurled before his feet.
He would stay to help,
but a storm is blowing from paradise
and a violent gust
propels him into the future
while past and present erupt
behind and beneath him.
This is what we call progress.
X
The themes of monastic discipline,
those vows of chastity and poverty,
on which the monk must ponder for an eternity
in life and death,
are the principles of his disengagement
from the world
in life and death.
So too our politicians’ faith
in our progress
(the movement toward a goal
in life and beyond death),
in their “mass basis”
(the chads falling to the floor
in a pile of unregistered opinion),
and in their servile integration
into an uncontrollable apparatus
(the rampant, warlike state),
shall be our principles of disengagement
in life and others’ death.
There is a much higher price to pay
for a conception of history
that will free us from complicity,
XI
Conformity and Social Democracy
tie worker to the shop-floor
in manufactories of self-exploitation
and self-negation.
Technological developments
bring bounties to mankind,
and these can be consumed
for the benefit of all.
Such at least is the glory
of the Stalinist five year plan.
In such a world the fantastic
becomes the norm
and common sense is subject
to ridicule.
Fourier’s four moons
can illuminate the earthly night;
and cooperation can help nature
to free the human spirit
of its gas guzzling
consumption of mineral deposits.
Exploiting nature
cannot deliver her of the creations
that lie dormant within her womb,
as potential,
when such potential is almost spent.
XII
We need history, but not the way the spoiled loafer
in the garden of knowledge needs it.
– Nietzsche, Of the Use and Abuse of History
Neither man nor men,
woman nor women
can be the depository
of human knowledge;
it is the non-man, non-woman,
the alien, the oppressed.
But the search for respectability,
acceptance as man and woman,
ends the search for knowledge.
We end up nourished by images
of enslaved ancestors,
searching for recourse
in reparations,
rather than those
of liberated grandchildren.
But when the world
is reduced to a pie –
pi-r-squared –
why not demand a bigger slice?
Let freedom become enslavement.
XIII
Every day our cause becomes clearer and people get smarter.
– Wilhelm Dietzgen, Die Religion der Socialdemokratie
Smart people,
Smart bombs,
Smarting people.
XIV
Origin is our goal.
– Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, vol. 1
And in our end, our purpose,
We shall find our beginning.
Robespierre’s origin was ancien Rome,
a past charged with the time of the now,
catapulted out of the continuum of history
to have present value, and present tense.
Fashion has a flair for the topical;
no matter where it stirs in the thickets
of long ago –
it is the tiger’s leap into the past.
Tiger, burning bright,
responds only to the commands
of the ruling class.
A Blair will yearn for the halcyon days
before Eden;
a Bush will burn for the desire
of a Rooseveltian imperial presidency,
with Raj-like purpose of moral uplift,
proclaimed aloud
amidst only quiet terror.
What will be our dialectic?
What ghosts will we summon up from the past
to be our antithesis,
so that we too can leap
into the open air of history,
forging a synthesis
from shards of broken memories?
XV
We will make time explode;
we will stop history
and get off.
Failing that,
we’ll stop the clocks.
XVI
The fleeting, time-fleecing present,
in which I write,
gives me perspective
that others could not have –
shrouded as they were
in mystery,
behind that veil
of History,
being the losers
and not winners,
like me.
Bah! We have sung historians
in many cities –
we will sing of the sun.
Sleeping with that whore,
called “Once upon a time”
in historicism’s bordello
is engaging,
but draining.
History as potential
dries up,
locked between the narrative legs
of “Once upon a time.”
But the materialist,
the realist
with his real list,
will remain in control of his faculties;
he will be disciplined
and man enough
to blast through the bordello
to the continuum of history.
Women and eunuchs
will have to remain behind.
XVII
Mustering a mass of data
without theoretical armature,
additive Universal History
subtracts the silences
from the past.
But the historian
of materialistic bent
searches for the oppressed past,
in the fissures
and interstices of the moment;
trying to disrupt the Messianic flow
propelling a specific era
out of the homogeneous course
of history –
as a specific life
or a specific work
out of the lifework.
Preservation of the lifework,
destruction of the lifework,
preservation of history
and its destruction,
the nurturing of a precious
but tasteless seed.
XVIII
In relation to the history of organic life on earth, the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.
The present,
that model of Messianic time
comprising the entire history of mankind
in an enormous abridgment,
coincides exactly
with the stature
which the history of mankind
has in the universe.
A
Only that which has no history is definable.
– Nietzsche
Finding the causal connection
between discrete moments
is the mark of historicism.
But no fact that is a cause
can be historical.
It becomes so
posthumously,
from events
that may be separated from it
by thousands of years.
The present,
“the time of now,”
is shot through
with chips
of Messianic time.
B
Soothsayers
who learn from time
what it has in store,
turn Messianic time
on its head.
We can strip the future
of its magic
by closing down
the futurists,
shutting up shop,
and dealing only in remembrance –
remembering what it is
we can remember,
looking not at ourselves in the mirror,
but at the image of ourselves
looking at a mirror.
That way we can know
that the unexpected
is restricted space,
a zone through which
only a Messiah may enter.
We will grab the past
by the scruff of the neck
and ensure that it conforms to our wish,
that we should only find
what we know has been lost.
* * * * *
Where are the other seventy-seven theses?
Will these eighteen
shake the foundations
of a church,
bolster a constitution,
or even put a bill to rights?
Where are the other seventy-seven theses?
Were they interrupted
by that self-inflicted wound,
brought on by despair
of escaping from Nazis
only to remain among the fascists?
Were they erased
in the recognition
that even Social Democracy
with all its messy Messianism
might be preferable
to the nihilistic might
of power unbridled,
leading irrevocably
towards its dark conclusions?
If so,
where does that leave us now,
with social democracy eating its own –
its constitution and its rights –
and shaking the foundations
of its own church
in a new crusade?
Perhaps,
like an Owl of Minerva
taking to flight
these missing seventy-five
will come to light
in the dusk
amidst the “shock” projectiles
that herald the arrival
of those legions
from ancien Rome.
Where are the other seventy-seven theses –
now that we need them?
No comments:
Post a Comment