In Memory of Walter Benjamin

…in tragedy, pagan man becomes aware that he is better than his god, but the realization robs him of speech, remains unspoken.

Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say that men go to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.

The Arcades Project comes to us today as a massive collection of notes on 19th century
industrial culture in Paris. One of its major interests to artists is its methodology which is fragmentary, collaged, aphoristic, and imagist. It is, in short, a philosophical project
whose structure is allegorical. Benjamin’s interest in Baudelaire had to do with the way
the poet collected the scraps of his time as a means of constructing allegories of the
Modern: “in order to express the universal, human problem of evil within the changed
context of Modern Life.” Benjamin saw in his allegorical process a dialectic that was
transformable, not only in the sense of transforming life into art but in transforming art
back into life.

Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley.

history is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. thus, to robespierre ancient rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. the french revolution viewed itself as rome incarnate. It evoked ancient rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into what has gone before.

On a horizontal beam supporting the roof of Brecht’s study, there is a painted inscription: “The truth is concrete.” On a window ledge stands a little wooden donkey that can nod its head. Brecht has hung a little notice around its neck with the words: “I, too, must understand it

The image of reality, as specifically represented in film and photography, is an image of the real that has been mediated, subjected to analysis, works with incongruities, destruction, construction, reconstructions.

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it… .

The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

~Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections