WB On The Treadmill
"Benjamin thrills me in
no small measure because he does not cohere, and beautifully."
R.B. Kitaj, apropos his painting
"The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin)"
When, several years
ago, I joined the gym I now go to, I kept imagining a short, stout Walter
Benjamin in a black suit jacket sweating profusely on the treadmill next to me.
This wasn't the WB who had been snatched up and translated into an afterlife of
often tortured academic discourse. It wasn't the WB of a dense thesis that
flunked him out of graduate school, nor of the incomparable essays. Nor yet was
this the WB of hashish writings so lovely they can make you wonder if all his
writing, all his thinking, aspired to that state, the state of poetry, and to
ask, further, if it wasn't the poetic, not to say stoned, immediacy of WB's
best prose that left his censorious buddy, Theodore Adorno, in the dialectical
dust.
WB on the treadmill,
half soft flesh, half shimmering cartoon mirage, was a WB who had put the pen
down, a WB of the very last days, on his last legs, hauling a bulging briefcase
over a mountain with the Gestapo on his trail. This was a WB who had come back
to burn off calories if he could, and to retroactively repair a cardiac
arrhythmia. He had a mountain on his mind, one he had lacked the fortitude to
scale more than once in the fall of 1940, so that when guards on the Spanish
side of the Pyrenees told him he would have to go back to Nazi occupied France,
he chose suicide rather than another climb.
I was drawn to
everything pertaining to his last days, not least of all the particulars of
Weimer heart ache. It turned out that "soldier's heart" commonly
afflicted returnees from World War I who had come close enough to an exploding
shell for it to permanently disrupt cardiac rhythm. WB, who never fought in the
war, seemed to have contracted a sympathetic version of the complaint, a
zeitgeist arrhythmia. And I found improbabilities bordering, to my mind, on
wonders about Benjamin's last days, and also moments when his peculiar
character, the character of an incessantly hounded, endlessly resolute man,
shone through.