time to meditate and create

Is she sleeping, perchance dreaming ?  No,  I rather think she’s meditating, ponderously so.   

Because you see, her eyes are open, if only barely – just enough for a brooding stare.

Let me engage you in a small experiment in order to prove my point about her melancholy state of mind.   Just do it, I mean adopt her pose:  put your right arm on an arm-rest, bend your right hand’s wrist downwards as far as you can, let it then support your horizontally positioned head and keep your eyelids open for about half a centimetre.  Remain in that state for at least 10 minutes.

Congratulations:  your performance is now  part of a rich western tradition in representing  Melancholy!

 Granted, it’s not highly rated these  days, melancholy musing ...  all that waste, sad time...  (1) 

Only, who says it’s wasted time?  Melancholy musing is also about thoughtful meditation and contemplation which throughout the ages have been associated with intellectual creative activity that surpasses the immediately useful and mediocre. (2)  

And then, nothing like a meditative spell to replenish the reserves of creative energy.   

Boredom and  “ennui” call for compensation  ;  from meditative stupor to the ‘frenzy of artistic temperament’ .

Notes & Nods to old friends

       (0)  Mary D. Garrard : Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622: Artemisia  as the Allegory of Painting, The Magdalen as Melancholy, The Reappropriation of Gendered Melancholy

(1)   « Rien n’est si insupportable à l’homme que d’être dans un plein repos, sans passions, sans affaire, sans divertissement, sans application.  Il sent alors son néant, son abandon, son insuffisance, sa dépendance, son impuissance, son vide. Incontinent, il sortira du fond de son âme l’ennui, la noirceur, la tristesse, le chagrin, le dépit, le désespoir.  […][…] L’âme ne trouve rien en elle qui la contente. […] C’est ce qui la contraint de se répandre au-dehors. »  Pascal, Pensées

(2)  « la mélancolie […] confère à l’âme d’une part l’inertie et l’indifférence , d’autre part la faculté de l’intelligence et de la contemplation »  Panofsky & Saxl, Dürer's "Melencolia I"

(3) hors catégorie;  "La mélancolie trahit le monde pour l'amour du savoir. Mais en s'abîmant sans relâche dans sa méditation, elle recueille les objets morts dans sa contemplation pour les sauver. [...] La persévérance qui s'exprime dans l'intention de la tristesse est née de sa fidélité envers le monde des objets". Walter Benjamin, Origine du drame baroque allemand  



 
 

the bravery of integrity (or: why Romola is no less of a heroine than Jane Eyre)

“Because literature is [...] a compendium of meanings
for this or that human lot, for this or that experience” (1)

“Dismiss the heroines without sympathy”? (3)

Why have George Eliot’s heroines been catching all that flak? (2) Even Virginia Woolf, though lavishing praise on Eliot, seems to do so rather despite Eliot’s heroines. (3) "Those who fall foul of George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and with good reason; for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of her"

So what's supposed to be wrong with these heroines? Are they not assertive enough? Are they too meek, too reflective? Do they perhaps commit the cardinal sin of not pursuing personal happiness single-mindedly enough? Does their behaviour smack too much of the sentimental-stoic ” though I can’t be happy – I can be good” ? (4)
Let’s simulate the prosecutors’ case, to find out what exactly these heroines are charged with (and to prepare their defense).

Dorothea
There is of course Dorothea in Middlemarch, who, for all her ardent personality does not rise to greatness. She first wastes her youthful energy on the vain scholarly efforts of a dour husband, and then, widowed, marries again the wrong sort of man.
So what does Eliot give her as a fate: “perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity”.
And then, at the end, Eliot does not only keep alive her un-heroic heroine , but even seeks to justify this “blundering life”!

“Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive”.

Yeah .... you see, lots of self-sacrifice and doing good without ever attaining glory or even personal happiness.

Romola
Or take Romola (from the eponymous novel) – here’s a fine, honourable and well-educated woman in 15th century Florence, who however has the misfortune to marry a dishonest opportunist. (5) The scoundrel-husband, Tito, is charming and ingratiating enough, but does not feel bound by any moral obligations and sees life merely as a “game of skill and luck”.
When Romola becomes aware of his moral failings, she is repulsed and resolves to flee. She briefly envisages a grand, though lonely, future “to go to the most learned woman in the world, Cassandra Fedele, at Venice, and ask her how an instructed woman could support herself in a lonely life there”.

But just when a chapter bravely concludes with “She was free and alone”, just as the sympathizing reader feels like cheering her on, wishing her the best of luck, the plot takes a stern turn with Romola being called back to her domestic and civic duties by Savonarola himself (that ancient Florentine paragon of Christian virtues).

So, reading on, we cringe to see Romola going back home to her husband, obeying him but living a parallel life of selflessly tending to the poor and the sick in pest-ridden Florence .
Meanwhile, Tito has been putting his charms and duplicitous skills to good use, making headway in the complicated Florentine political world (in the process disowning his old and needy foster parent and also managing to father a couple of children with an unsuspecting naive mistress).

So again, a case of feminine self-sacrifice and doing good , easily outwitted by selfish duplicity which single-mindedly pursues its own goals.
Depressing, really. How the reader yearns for a more indomitable and “fierily egotistical” heroine – such as the saucy Jane Eyre, fighting rejection with the proud battle cry: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself”

At the end of the Romola-novel, some sort of justice is done though: Tito’s double-dealing is exposed and he’s killed by the foster father he had disowned. In the epilogue we find a placid Romola (“an eager life had left its marks upon her” ), in her well-furnished Florentine study, surrounded by friends, teaching Tito’s son. But this “happy-ending-of -sorts” has not placated the detractors of Eliot’s virtuous heroines .
For them, it is precisely the unlikely, far-fetched way in which Tito gets his final just desserts which confirms that George Eliot did not wish to grant to Romola herself the personal strength and guts to prevail but instead resorted to outrageous, near supernatural, twists of the plot to set things right.

A harsh verdict...: guilty because not happy?

Encapsulating the prosecutors’ case, here’s a very selective quote of Virginia Woolf on Eliot’s heroines – seemingly harsh (but perhaps already containing the seeds of the defense) (5):

“Each has the deep feminine passion for goodness [...] In learning they seek their goal; in the ordinary tasks of womanhood; in the wider service of their kind. They do not find what they seek and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand for something - they scarcely know what - for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence. [...]
Save for the supreme courage of their endeavour, the struggle ends, for her heroines, in tragedy, or in a compromise that is even more melancholy. But their story is the incomplete version of the story that is George Eliot herself.”

Summing up the accusations: why couldn’t George Eliot give us more combative heroines - who could both fulfill their personal ambitions and find domestic bliss with a suitable mate? Heroines who find what they seek, heroines who are happy for all the world to see!
Especially since such a happy fate was not utopian, as George Eliot herself had shown through her own, brave, choices in life.(6)

“the greatness that belongs to integrity”! (7)

But let me now, at last, rush to the defence of Dorothea and Romola !

First of all, why blaming Eliot for writing novels with a realistic, though pessimistic, assessment of the human condition? Isn’t it a fact of life that “the unscrupulous are more likely to succeed in any struggle for power” (8)? Do not examples abound of the fact that “ virtue, after all, is far from being synonymous with survival; duplicity is” (8).

And yet, and yet, despite all our disillusioned realism don’t we indeed carry some idea, some desire of justice within us? And isn’t longing (9) integral to the human soul, and not to be dismissed as a mere fancy even if it is not within our power to realize it? So again, why blaming Eliot for novels that evoke exactly this ambiguity of the human condition?
“Justice is [...] not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning”.

And then, secondly, I personally cannot find that much fault with Eliot’s heroines. I don’t think they’re that downtrodden, actually I find them far braver than many of their more cheeky sisters in literature. They may not find a suitable mate, they may not rise to fame (10) – but they do retain their full personal integrity. In fact, they cope with life’s adversities, with the world’s “meanness of opportunity” and , not least, with their own limitations with “all the grace and dignity they can muster”.
Why would Jane Eyre be worth more just because she finds “perfect concord” with Mr Rochester?
And speaking of depressing literary heroines ... please spare me the female figments of 19th Century male imagination. Spare me the likes of Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, even Effi Briest ... victims of their presumed irrationality, mercilessly convicted to death by their creators.

Really, I very much prefer Eliot’s heroines. Because of their genuine though unsuccessful yearnings, their reflectiveness, their tenacity, their honesty and, most of all, because of their unfailing integrity...

They may not triumph on the world’s stage , but at least they stay alive, they potter on, they don’t go mad – which is actually quite an achievement for a 19th century female literary character!

Notes & Quotes
(1) Joseph Brodsky
(2) discussing the worth of fictional characters (beyond technical considerations), boils down to assessing possible ways of being as represented by the writer – so these are inevitably highly subjective discussions ...
(3) Virginia Woolf on George Eliot , article first published in The Times Literary Supplement, 20th November, 1919.
(4) “though I can’t be happy, I can be good” : an exhortation that indeed, throughout the ages, has kept too many a good woman from rebelling against crushing conditions
(5) But then, VW’s text is delightfully brimming with nuances and ambiguities – a text worth reading and savouring again and again
(6) from the introduction to Romola by Dorothea Barrett: “None of these heroines is permitted to find the answer that George Eliot found for herself”
(7) Romola, p 582
(8) Joseph Brodsky
(9) Ah, Longing! How I cherish longing.
Longing in its most ineffective form, as an agnostic but metaphysical desire. Desires for instances of beauty, goodness, justice, ... that are not of this world.
Surely there must be many profound philosophical treatises on the subject. But for now I’ll stick to a couple evocative quotes:
- “The narrator declares her agnosticism, but at the same time describes human desires that history and reality cannot accommodate, desires that find their fulfillment only in the imaginative world of romance. “Justice is like the Kingdom of God – it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning” “(again Dorothea Barrett in her Romola-introduction)
- “[Eliot’s heroines] demand for something - they scarcely know what - for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence” (again VW on GE)
- (nothing to do with Eliot but a great occasion none the less for one my favourite Walter Benjamin quotes): “the new is mythic because its potential is not yet fully realized – the old is mythic because its desires never were fulfilled “
(10) And, frankly, isn’t Romola’s 15th Century fate somehow consistent with Virginia Woolf’s own historical hypothesis in “if Shakespeare had a sister”?

contingent conversations (or: continuous self-doubt)

“His collections are the practical man’s answer to the aporias of theory” (1)




"And I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious and independent citizens "(2)

“she has radical and continuous doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered” […] “always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies and thus of their selves” […] “ continuous self-doubt” (3)



“He was austere with himself […] But he had an approved tolerance for others ; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds” (4)

“All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life, but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance” (5)



“Anything from the sound of a word through the color of a leaf to the feel of a piece of skin can […] serve to dramatize and crystallize a human being’s sense of self-identity. […] It can symbolize the blind impress all our behaving bear. Any seemingly random constellation of such things can set the tone of a life. Any such constellation can set up an unconditional commandment to whose service a life may be devoted – a commandment no less unconditional because it may be intelligible to, at most, only one person. “ (6)

« A supposer que Ruskin se soit quelquefois trompé, comme critique, dans l’exacte appréciations de la valeur d’une œuvre, la beauté de son jugement erroné est souvent plus intéressante que celle de l’oeuvre jugée » (7)


« Cicero says “I prefer before heaven to go astray with Plato rather than hold true views with his opponents”. It is a matter of taste to prefer Plato’s company and the company of his thoughts even if this should lead us astray from truth. Certainly a very bold, even an outrageously bold statement, especially because it concerns the truth. […] for the true humanist neither the verities of the scientist nor the truth of the philosopher nor the beauty of the artist can be absolutes; the humanist, because he is not a specialist, exerts a faculty of judgment and taste which is beyond the coercion which each specialty imposes upon us” (8)

“The thinking ego is sheer activity and therefore ageless, sexless, without qualities, and without a life story.” (9)




« Situé hors du temps, que pourrait-il craindre de l’avenir? « (10)






10 contingent contributions
(1) Walter Benjamin - Eduard Fuchs, Collector & Historian
(2) Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
(3) Richard Rorty – Contingency, irony and solidarity
(4) Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
(5) Walter Benjamin The Task of the Translator
(6) Richard Rorty – Contingency, irony and solidarity
(7) Marcel Proust – Traduction de “la bible d’Amiens”
(8) Hannah Arendt – The Crisis in Culture
(9) Hannah Arendt – The Life of the Mind
(10) Marcel Proust – A la recherche du temps perdu

magically murky moments (1)

Let me first express my gratitude to nuruL H: the sheer zest of her buoyantly alliterative posts & titles is justification enough for alliteration, this lovely linguistic mannerism (in which I too like to indulge).
In many contexts, however, alliteration has a bad reputation (just as rhyme has): it is considered as frivolous & superfluous. A silly ornament, distracting from the message.

I’m of course quite used to accept humbly society’s strictures on the aesthetic (2) , but as far as language is concerned, I do beg to differ, & to grumble: there’s more to alliteration than a silly play!

Looking for a smack of serious science to back this up, I found a reference to the
memory-enhancing benefits of alliteration. Which may suggest that our brain not only stores words as symbols or signs, but also according to their sound. (3)
But of course I would prefer alliteration to be just a bit more than a cerebral storage & retrieval trick, I would want it to have meaning!

Daniel Tammet (a high-functioning autistical savant, with extraordinary fluency in both numbers and language) claims just that: words are no mere arbitrary conventions to denote reality. Words, or more precisely, how words sound, have intrinsic connotations .
It is no meaningless coincidence that following words start with “b”: ball bean bubble balloon.

But I must admit, my objective judgment in these matters is totally compromised by my own love of language which is so intimately bound up with my longing for meaning. So of course I would project magical meaning in alliteration.

Anyway, it gives me a good excuse to quote (again) Adam Kirsch, from his wonderfully insightful article about Walter Benjamin’s poetic longing for meaning.

“Of course, secular reason holds that human languages are purely conventional, but Benjamin would not countenance the idea that words are arbitrary. […] The vision of language that Benjamin advances here is moving precisely because it is beyond logical proof, and because it expresses so eloquently his longing for meaning in a world that usually presents itself as mere chaos. [..]

“Quod in imaginibus, est in lingua” . How crucial the notion was to Benjamin’s thought […] he felt that names and things belonged together, that a rhyme had revealed a reality."






Notes
(1) In fact, this post was just going to display the two photos. Evoking some dear moments, filled with ambiguous light: one taken once upon a spring evening, lost in thoughts on a train and another, coming home from work late, rejoicing in the magical mix of artificial and natural luminosity ( “l’heure entre chien et loup”). But then the ‘murky moments' title popped up and then there was nuruL’s ‘may messages’ post. Too many signs to ignore – hence the mutation into a ponderous post about alliteration.
(2) I always have to run a thorough alliteration-purging check on memos I produce in a work context, since the merest hint of playfulness would of course ruin the memo’s credibility.
(3) It never ceases to amaze (& depress) me how different the conventions of “efficiently communicating a message” in a business context are from the conventions of “conveying meaning and insight” in the artistic & philosophical realm.
(4) Personally, I’m significantly more inclined to exuberant alliteration in English than in my mother tongue. Perhaps because I’ve acquired so much of my English by looking up words in an alphabetically organized dictionary? And that would be why my brain has stored the word “fragment” quite close to the word “frivolous”?

while updating my CV

Updating one’s Curriculum Vitae is nothing but a banal act of prudence, adapting to these uncertain times. While doing so, you’re obviously not supposed to ponder in earnest the course of your life, and even less should you start wondering about what that life really amounts to. But staring at the neatly unbroken sequence of Dates and Facts, resuming Work Experience and Education and Skills, one can only conclude (with bewildered puzzlement): this is not it, this is not it at all, my life has flown into another channel .... (1)

And this is not just about the evident difference between public and private life, not just about the fact that a CV will not list how people came and went, how loves were found & lost and found & lost again. It is about the amazing fact that a CV does not give the slightest hint of one’s sense of self , does not give a single clue to one’s inner life (be it of the mind or of the soul).

Imagine then a thematic CV, built around one’s defining insights, passions & obsessions – a CV full of objective information diligently based on say, significant evidence found in one’s cupboards & book-cases – such as fading photos with pin-holes testifying to a former personal iconic status; such as doubly & triply -underlined sentences in books, ….

A prominent theme in such a CV of mine would surely have to be “Angels”, “Angels” in their most poignant sense of atheist longing of course. The available evidence might point to a certain sentimentalist & kitschy aesthetic streak in youth
- but all in all, what sets the tone of the theme is rather the somber & knowing reflective-ness of angels, their powerless sympathy with vainly striving humans.

Chronologically Wim Wender’s film “Der Himmel über Berlin”/ “Wings of desire” has to feature first on the CV ( with the mention it is the only film I ever went to see three times in the same week, & with the mention I saw it at age 22, just before I had to plunge headlong in the work-experience as detailed on the official CV).
Oh, it was all there – humans and their catastrophic history, and their eternally clashing or frustrated desires, and their loneliness, and their longings.

And the melancholy sense of this human condition which only the contemplative, the irrelevant members of society truly have.

Thus, seeing and pitying human drama & comedy is the task of powerless , eternally silently murmuring angels. The task of angels, because humans are too wrapped up in their own present battles – too busy preparing the future.

Yes – it was all there (2) , and this poignant image of the powerless, horrified and sympathizing angel has accompanied me for the next twenty years. And surely it is no coincidence that all of my most cherished writers and artists did have something to say about angels ... Like the perfect sentence to resume our dependence on angels as our non-judgmental witnesses of last resort, I found it somewhere in the works of Anna Blaman (3): “only the powerless attentiveness of sympathizing angels”.

Later of course, I could feel challenged by the Rilkian despair that not even angels would hear us: “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? “ (4)

And then, ah, the encounter with Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, which does merit a lengthy quote :

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (5)

Only angels can thus bear to view & remember history as this catastrophe of human suffering. Only angels, or perhaps also some rare melancholy contemplative humans (the kind of irrelevant individuals which are disqualified anyhow for the optimist task of building the future).

So it’s clearly in this sense that I interpret Benjamin’s insight of history “ as a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly”. (6)

Now I shall refrain from a brief history of angels in art (7), and only quote the very latest acquired angelic reference (for which I have to thank a certain flowervillain ) : here’s Gombrich on a statue by Anna Mahler:

“ [..] the entrance of a cemetery for which she created a model twenty-four years ago: the erect figure of an angel standing on a high square pillar, wiping his tears with one of his wings - an austere vision, utterly devoid of sentimentality”

But what on earth set off this pathetic angelic post? A CV??? Yes, and the moral musings inevitably produced by these dire times.
More specifically, the growing realization that in the practical world, wanting to hold high moral values of human sympathy and wanting “to stand guiltless” in fact condemns one to irrelevance and powerlessness. ( And people may even despise those who have not the power to help them).
What a choice – either compromise on tender moral feelings, play the game and be rewarded with at least some relevance in the world (including the power to, maybe just maybe, right some of the wrongs).
Or stand unwaveringly guiltless and therefore renounce any position of real power in the world and so be condemned to “powerless sympathy” … (8).

CV’s don’t carry footnotes, do they?

(1) Paraphrasing Anna Achmatova
(2) Not all was there : I don’t remember for instance much insistence on angels’ androgyny . Angels not being trapped in human genetics, they’re of course neither male nor female. An d their androgyny is obviously integral to their impotence/ barrenness, which in turn guarantees their disinterested attentiveness : indeed, they’re not propelled by selfish genes bent on reproduction.
(3) Anna Blaman: Dutch writer, active in the 40s & 50s – I don’t know whether she’s still read today – I suspect she’s far too pathetically-earnestly existential for our ironizing times. Here’s the quote (as I remember it, I couldn’t track it down) in Dutch: “ Alleen de machteloze belangstelling van sympathiserende engelen”
(4) It is such a strong line that I have to quote it “jeder engel ist schrecklich”, but clearly it does not at all enter in my personal iconology of boundlessly empathizing angels
(5) From Benjamin’s “Theses on the philosophy of history” as compiled in Illuminations
(6) Straying from angels to melancholy writers such as W. G. Sebald and Orhan Pamuk – at the core of their work there is this same reflective and pitying sadness, a sadness of knowing too much, a sadness of too much moral non-judgmental sensitivity, too much understanding while “speaking of very ugly matters” .
(7) Though what a history that is!!!! The little shrieking & crying & hand-wringing angels of Giotto (as described by Proust), the grave Renaissance angel-musicians, the many impetuous Annunciation angels with fluttering wings , the sensuously swinging angels of Bernini, the angel accompanying Tobias on his winding road, Dürer’s terrible angels, not to mention the many weeping angels at graves, and the irreverent little fat putti so far removed from both heaven and hell …
8) a good occasion to quote from Pamuk's Snow (that sublime, melancholy, moving, kind, desperate novel): "an honest and well-meaning man, like those Chekhovian characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life - full of melancholy"

S. Swann, Private Investigator (1)

It was one of those days …. I had sat idling at my desk for hours, smoking and watching the shadows of the venetian blinds advancing ever so slowly on the opposite wall. But nobody had called. Nobody needed the services of S. Swann, Private Investigator. Well, I would wait for those creeping shadows to reach the right hand corner of the wall, and then I’ d just call it a day. Cheered by this virile resolve, I started tapping an expense note for the last client I ‘d had - last month or so. Tap. Tap. Tap. This typewriter sure made a lot of noise. Tap. Tap. Tap . Then I looked up and saw a shadow behind the smoked glass door, a shadow knocking like hell on the glass….

At this point a stunning lady, clad in black, wearing a veiled hat, should enter. Upon which our cynical private eye falls in love precipitously and embarks on a tumultuous investigation fraught with danger, deceptions & double-binds. After having disentangled all kinds of plots and subplots, our private eye then finds himself again alone in his office , bruised but unbroken, smoking.

I absolutely adore these classical noir detective stories , with their wise-cracking, melancholy private eyes and their scheming, stunning ladies in black. In younger days I have devoured all the books by Chandler, Hammett, … . And nothing like those 40s and 50s black &white film versions ( ah, the iconic Humphrey Bogart with hat, trench coat , and cigarette dangling from his lips …). From the classics I then soon branched out to even tougher stuff: the mono-syllabic Mickey Spillane, the Goodis-tales from the gutter, JH Chase’s and William Irish’s dark spells and, later on, James Ellroy’s almost baroque, violent LA stories.

My living quarters of the time reflected this infatuation: they of course had blinds instead of curtains and I even had a Fedora-hat lying about on a cupboard (though I did not go as far as wearing it in public). Not to mention my youthful smoking mannerisms which sure drew upon PI theatrics. And then there were my lonely city rambles walking hours and hours on end, seeking out seedy districts, shady station neighborhoods, river quays, decaying industrial towns ), as well as my then predilection for disreputable “gin-joints” …

Well, I have curtains instead of blinds now, I quit smoking, I do not walk into gin-joints anymore and art and philosophy books have almost crowded out crime on my book-shelves. But mind you, I did pick my philosophical allegiances carefully! And my reverence for Walter Benjamin, the most poetic and urban of all philosophers, has everything to do with the redemptive narrative he offered for those days of yore, those many days spent in aimless reading and wandering.

Here was a philosopher who linked the modern city’s avalanche of sensations, its crowds of anonymous persons to the birth of the detective story. « Man is increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of experience », he is bombarded by sensations and bits of information without any connection. When walking the streets we encounter numerous anonymous people, all wrapped up in their private stories and interests. People can disappear into the crowd, so many things could happen at any turn of the street. But though we all share the same cramped sidewalks and undergrounds, we do not share a common experience or story, we do not know each others’ tales or secrets.

So enter the detective story, with the urban detective … who “walks these mean streets” (2) , who follows the traces, disentangles the secrets… Or enter the flâneur, the observing flâneur, who can legitimize his idle loitering & strolling by becoming a detective. “No matter what trail the flâneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime”. (3)

Now I don’t know whether Benjamin has ever read any Chandler or Hammett. In any case, his discourse about detectives and flâneurs goes back to the 19th century, to Edgar Allan Poe and to Baudelaire.

Yes, to Baudelaire…. the 19th century urban poet by excellence, and whose poem “à une passante” , “to a passer by” (4) evokes the hustle and bustle of a street scene , and how, suddenly, amidst the crowd one can come under the spell of a passer by , a radiating presence , a fleeting & fatal beauty that strikes and then, is gone forever …… "For I know not where you flee, you know not where I go"

Benjamin comments: “this is the look of the object of a love which only a city-dweller experiences, which Baudelaire captured for poetry, and of which one might not infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied, fulfillment.” (5)

This, of course, is also the kind of fatal collisions with femme fatales which Chandler & co captured for the gritty detective novel.

And the kind of collision amidst a whirling urban crowd which Edith Piaf sang about in her captivating, roiling song
“La Foule” / “The Crowd”


Read on for accompanying lyrics in the notes
(1) The kind of blog-post you get when people start talking about Chandler and philosophy (blame Phoenix!)
(2) Chandler - The Simple Art of Murder: “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man … He is a relatively poor man or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.”
(3) Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”
(4) Baudelaire - Les fleurs du mal « à une passante »
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa […]
Un éclair … puis la nuit! Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité ?
Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici ! Trop tard ! Jamais peut-être!
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais !
(English Translation from Benjamin’s “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
The deafening street was screaming all around me.
Tall, slender, in deep mourning – majestic grief –
a woman made her way […]
A lightning-flash … then night! – O fleeting beauty
Whose glance all of a sudden gave me new birth,
Shall I see you again only in eternity?
Far, far from here! Too late! Or maybe, never?
For I know not where you flee, you know not where I go,
O you I would have loved (o you who knew it too)
(5) Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
(6) les paroles de La Foule

it blooms because it blooms

This is a difficult age to maintain poetic wonder. Our flights of fancy are continuously called to order by scientific facts. Yes, science has made a mess of our metaphors.

Take these lines from a very old poem, “without why” (1) :

“The rose is without why; It blooms because it blooms
It cares not for itself, asks not if it is seen”

Lines to “praise purposelessness” and to console us for all of our ignored endeavors, our unseen pictures, our unheard songs.

Now Darwinism has of course revealed the eminently selfish purpose behind the rose’s boisterous bloom or the peacock’s dashingly colored plumes: mere stratagems to attract bees or mates and ensure reproduction.
So there goes the consoling metaphor of the disinterestedly, solitarily blooming rose.

Shall we then turn to Walter Benjamin for poetic justice? Benjamin who wanted to salvage the intrinsic meaning and significance of all human “thought things”, save them from the need to be validated by either usefulness or public acclaim.

And so he arrives at the wonderful paradox : “no poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener”. An intoxicating phrase, implying that even a never read poem would still have its claim on intrinsic worth and significance. A tempting paradox indeed, but Benjamin did realize that this affirmation of his could not be vindicated in the human realm. (2)


So let’s descend to a worldlier philosophy – let’s hear what the eminent Mr. Hegel has to say on the matter.

He compares the "naively self-centered" origin of natural beauty (“the variegated richly colored plumage of birds shines even when unseen” ) with the work of art that has as its purpose to exist solely for our mind and spirit. “[the work of art] is essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind and the spirit”. (3)



This call to another human sensibility is inherent in a work of art. Maybe that’s why I can contentedly roam about art galleries on my own but shrink back from solitary nature walks.

The art works are there for me, they need my attention as a sentient and thinking human being. But nature …. I could get choked by existential angst when alone in nature, of even the most dazzling kind. Natural beauty can be so devastatingly indifferent to the human being, so meaningless … Unless... unless we shoot pictures of it, paint it, sing it – to share the experience and thus to humanize it.




notes without why
(1) Angelus Silesius, 1657, “Ohne Warum” (as quoted in English by Hannah Arendt in “Men in dark times”)
(2) Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator”: “For example, one could speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten them. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it not be forgotten, that predicate would not contain a falsehood but merely a claim that is not being fulfilled by men, and perhaps also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance”
(3) and here I shun all Darwinian references – this is about aesthetic sensibilities, about intimations of the sublime, no less. Don’t anyone dare to point out that art is just another evolutionary ruse to advertise one’s genes to potential mates.

Moonlight Serenade (please see note 1 below)

So. A Sunday-morning. Head not too dull after a windy bike-ride. And plenty of serious subjects that would qualify for plenty of fragmented, frivolous posts.

I really really should do a lengthy post on my favorite author, whose writings I mostly do not really understand, but whose books are such a consoling presence in my library (2), and to whom I always return: Walter Benjamin .

Or perhaps I can suffice with a second hand post about an article by Adam Kirsch on Benjamin. I think Kirsch got quite close to why Benjamin’s obscure & hermetic writings are so devoutly loved. They’re loved, because Benjamin’s “vision of language […] expresses so eloquently his longing for meaning” .

“the allure of his thought lies in his imagination of a perfected world, in which objects would be redeemed from their imprisoning silence”.

And don’t we all (well those of us that aren’t astrophysics scientists, or theologians, or even mere non-nonsense civil engineers), so don’t we all long to find meaning in a chaotic reality – and finding meaning through the scarce modes of understanding we have at our disposal: words, images, … . Grasping reality poetically …

And so Kirsch concludes (one of the many sentences in his article I feverishly underlined):

“Ultimately, his strange, beautiful works are best read as fragments (3) of a great poem – the poem of a longing that no world, and Benjamin’s least of all (4) , could possibly satisfy”.

Oh and I should also do a ponderous post on “marginality” and “exile” and what Edward Said (1935-2003 Palestinian intellectual ) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975 Jewish intellectual) had to say about that.

And then I should definitely do a post to fend off any accusations of name-dropping : I don’t drop names, I recite them , reverently & lovingly. Somehow those names serve like talismans – “reminding me of what I value”, evoking a world of wisdom & wit & beauty where I alas cannot often dwell.

Yes, many posts call out to be written, and yet what’s foremost on my mind now: an image of a still, moon-lit garage-court.

Tonight, getting up and looking out of the window, I was startled by the intense moonlight. So clean, so pervasive a light, projecting sharply delineated shadows. And that garage-court so empty and so very still and aloof. . . so completely self-sufficient, not needing any spectators. (5)

Indispensable notes

(1) You’ll need some patience, but just read on, and in the closing paragraph you’ll be duly rewarded with moonlight
(2) Please allow me to call this collection of ramshackle book-cases of mine “my library”, if only to indulge in visions of noble hushed bourgeois interiors
(3) Ha! Indeed, fragments …. Maybe this phrase is also a source to quote for my blog-title
(4) We all know Benjamin never found an intellectual home, lived in poverty in Paris, has never finished his magnum opus, had to flee the Nazis and, when failing to cross the French-Spanish border, committed suicide “in despair and exhaustion”
(5) I’m cheating, this is not a pic from last night’s moonlit vision – it’s a melting snow man in that same court-yard, two years ago – but the self-sufficient stillness is the same