http://www.bu.edu/agni/essays/print/2003/57-blume.html
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.
I discovered, for
example, that the region of the Pyrenees Benjamin had to traverse was reputedly
patrolled by wild bulls. So, at any rate, his guide, Lisa Fittko, warned him,
at the end of what was meant to be an exploratory hike, when WB, pleading his
bad heart, chose to remain on the mountain alone, overnight, rather than start
up all over again the next day. Talk of bulls couldn't dissuade him, so Fittko
offered to stay, too, at which point: "[h]e smiled," she recalled,
"and said, 'Are you going to protect me from your wild bulls, *Gnadige
Frau?*'"
He had soft, large
eyes, this WB of the treadmill, when I could make them out behind the mist of
sweat on his thick lenses, Betty Boop eyes, so it seemed.
Another scene that
haunted me from his climb: Benjamin, Fittko and Jose, her companion, come to a
particularly difficult stretch, a nearly vertical incline, which Benjamin, in
"even tones," says he can't manage. Fittko and Jose put him between
them, get his arms around their shoulders, and pretty much heave him uphill. In
my mind's eye the episode takes the form of a Chinese character poster or a
mural-sized Tarot card. Fittko and Jose are hardy, smiling peasant types
sporting red bandannas. Their bare legs gleam in the pure Mediterranean light as
they muscle Benjamin's awkward, strangely spongy form up toward the snorting
white bull at the top of the incline, horns lowered, preparing to charge.
Just as Benjamin clutched his briefcase during this ordeal -- "squinting now and again," toward it, according to Fittko -- so does he grip it on the treadmill, the x-trainer, the elliptical cross-trainer, and the exercise bike. (He cares only for aerobic fitness, ignores the free weights, and, for that matter, shuns the locker room and shower.) In 1940, he repeatedly informed his guides that the briefcase was more important than he was; he was merely its vehicle, its legs. At all costs, it had to escape the Nazis. Thus, when he became dehydrated on the climb, he stopped to drink from a pool of green, stinking water -- "unthinkable" water, said Fittko, that would give him typhus. Typhus was fine, he replied. Typhus would get him "*after* crossing the frontier." The briefcase would be safe.
WB as Federal Express
man, WB as the all-weather mail.
What manuscript was so
precious? Could the briefcase, possibly, have contained the book on hashish
that he once promised Gershom Scholem would be "truly exceptional,"
though for the time being he wanted his plans for that volume kept to their
correspondence? It's also conceivable, given Benjamin, that the briefcase
contained no manuscript at all, perhaps only the sleeping pills on which he
planned to overdose, if necessary. There is an incident from Benjamin's last
days that supports the argument for a null briefcase.
Before escaping from a
detention camp near Marseilles, Benjamin gave up smoking, according to Hans,
Fittko's husband, and Benjamin's companion in the camp, and bellyached
endlessly about "the agonies of withdrawal." Hans took this hapless,
impractical Jew aside to wise him up, telling him that if a prisoner wanted to
survive, he should: "Always look for gratification and not for additional
hardship." Benjamin begged to disagree. Additional hardship was exactly
what he needed. Giving up smoking would be the "one great" effort, he
argued, that would concentrate his mind.
The camp, bad as it
was, wasn't adverse enough for him, or was adverse in too many small, unrelated
ways. He needed to customize adversity, get it all in one place, compact it.
This may seem like sheer perversity on his part, but may well have reflected
profound self-awareness, considering how many different kinds of intellectual
stimuli he was susceptible to -- how, as we might see it now,
"distractible" he was. If he had to give up tobacco to survive
internment, it's just possible that to get himself over a mountain, he needed
the added burden of an empty briefcase or a briefcase stuffed with stones.
Still another
possibility suggests itself, namely that the briefcase was crammed with smut.
The argument for a porn briefcase goes like this: Benjamin was famously, and
also somewhat helplessly, a collector, and not just of books. He was a serial
collector, migrating from one kind of collectible to another. In "Moscow
Diary" he notes that "as often happens with me, I had been
concentrating exclusively on one thing as I made my way through the streets: it
was lacquer boxes in this particular case. A short, passionate
infatuation." And so, in the bitter Moscow winter of 1926, instead of replacing
his old gloves -- useless and "full of holes" -- he squandered rubles
on lacquer boxes. Perhaps, then, the briefcase was filled with the fruits of a
longer and more intense infatuation than he had with lacquer boxes, and
represented the shadow side of a mostly thwarted, or covert sexuality. Yes, he
was married for a time, and had a son, but one wonders, apart from that, where
did his love go?
Again in "Moscow
Diary," he takes notice of a moment when Asja Lacis, his maddeningly
elusive beloved, straightens out his coat collar as they leave a theater.
"At this contact," he writes, "I realized just how long it had
been since any hand had touched me with gentleness." When I read this, my
heart breaks for Benjamin. But the statement makes me all the more willing to
reconsider the implications of his gorgeous allusion to "that most
terrible drug -- ourselves -- which we take in solitude." And I can't help
but entertain the idea that his briefcase disappeared because Benjamin made
sure his most profane collection would not be the one he would be remembered
by. Therefore, before overdosing, he tossed the briefcase into a Spanish
garden, where it has served as a planter for flowers or tomatoes, its contents
dissolving into a compost pile.
It's not just
Benjamin's briefcase, and the alleged manuscript that have disappeared. So has
his body. It's true that Spanish tour guides routinely refer visitors to his
grave. But Gershom Scholem has definitively pronounced, as if upon a tangled
matter of Jewish mysticism: "Certainly, the spot is beautiful, but the
grave is apocryphal."
WB on the treadmill
divulges nothing about these matters. But he's fascinated by the row of
televisions arrayed opposite the machines. "Television," he confides,
" is antimatter." Maybe he means something deep by that, or maybe he
thinks the afternoon soaps are just the extra burden that will help him lose
weight.
*** *** ***
This fix on Benjamin
-- treadmill, briefcase and all -- is of course not the orthodox one. Except,
in another sense, it couldn't be more orthodox. It is cultic; it converts
Benjamin's final days into a bungled Calvary consisting of garbled Stations of
the Briefcase. Gershom Scholem has observed that Benjamin's "critical and
metaphysical prose" had an "enormous suitability for canonization . .
. for quotation as a kind of Holy Writ." But Benjamin's "suitability
for canonization" extends beyond the prose. It's the life, too, that pulls
one toward commentary and interpretation -- toward *midrashim*, as Scholem
might have put it -- more say, than Scholem's own life, or that of Adorno,
Brecht, or Asja Lacis. They were all key interlocutors for Benjamin, essential
to him, at the heart of his most prized collection, that of formative
dialogues, but they share one attribute that sets them apart -- they escaped.
Thus they can never stand in for and summarize the fate of all those who did
not escape. They could never have inspired Herbert Marcuse to words like the
following, with which he concluded "One Dimensional Man": "At
the beginning of the fascist era Walter Benjamin wrote: 'It is only for the
sake of those without hope that hope is given to us."
These words, which I
read in the sixties, were my first rumor of Benjamin. Who was he, I wondered,
that Marcuse would reverently give him the last word? At the time, my sixties
utopianism was at its height, Marcuse having played no small part in fomenting
it. When I finally read Benjamin himself, almost a decade later, it helped put
that utopianism to rest, folding it into a broader view of things. Everything I
have since read by or about Benjamin has deepened the sense of pathos Marcuse
instilled at the start. Failure to escape, after all, was only one of
Benjamin's failures, each compounding the others. He failed at love as well. He
failed to secure any university position, and with it, any semblance of
financial security. Larry McMurtry reproaches him for failing, finally, even at
literature.
In "Walter
Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond," McMurtry
describes Benjamin as laboring under "the curse of the exaggerated
expectation which his own early brilliance had created." He believes
Benjamin to have been dogged all his days by failure to "produce a
masterwork." Perhaps. Or perhaps Benjamin resisted the urge to produce a
"masterwork" in much the same way as he warded off the temptation to
write the kind of thesis that would have won him a university position. A
tenured WB, his intellectual contours stabilized by a "masterwork" --
the one in the briefcase? -- is not so easy to imagine, maybe least of all for
Benjamin himself. Besides, when scouting out Benjamin's collected writings for
signs of a masterwork McMurtry is clearly looking for something large (else he
would been content to certify, "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works
of Nilolai Leskov," the essay that initially drew him to Benjamin, as
masterwork enough.)
In measuring a
masterwork by size, McMurtry runs counter to Benjamin's own sensibility. For
Benjamin, smallness gave the finishing touch to a masterpiece. If he was
disappointed in his own output, it was likely because he could not produce a
work so small that it hovered near invisibility. Scholem records the
"rapture" that seized Benjamin when, at a museum, he pointed out
"two grains of wheat" on which the *Shema Israel*, Judaism's basic
prayer, had been inscribed. Think, then, of Benjamin's delight had he been able
to inscribe the whole of, say, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," on a single frame of film.
The incompleteness
McMurtry sees in Benjamin is inseparable from his perennial appeal, even to
McMurtry. A more fully realized Benjamin would likely not have been the
character McMurtry felt so comfortable taking with him to a Dairy Queen in
Texas, and consulting about the "emptiness, geographical and social, that
my grandparents faced" when they arrived. It's hard to see McMurtry
picturing such a Benjamin "in the wagon with [his grandparents] the day
they stopped and unloaded by the fine, seeping spring," or picking Benjamin's
mind about everything from cattle-ranching to angiograms.
Benjamin fought hard
for incompleteness. He held on tight to it when others tried to pry it away.
With Scholem, for example, he fought for Marx. With his Marxists peers, he
fought for (or camouflaged) some version of the Messiah. Against Adorno's
insistence on towering dialectics, he fought for a direct, intense immediacy.
Lacis pulled him toward Moscow, Scholem toward Palestine, and Adorno toward
America, where he feared being displayed, with a pile of thick books, perhaps,
as "The Last European." Apropos the Biblical story of Exodus, Kafka
once referred to himself as wandering in the desert in the reverse. Benjamin's
trajectory was more complex. He had many Egypts, many wanderings, many Promised
Lands and reverses -- if they were reverses at all.
Benjamin had the
peculiar ability to miniaturize every totality, to boil it down to a fragment,
an essence, and to put into play against other essences. His most elegant works
are like networks, switching stations among these elements. The way he overlay
Marxism and Messianism in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History,"
for example, helped me, at the end of the sixties, see that fading era as one
more spike on a graph with many eruptions, religious or not, of what he labeled
the "messianic urge." Similarly, to read "The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as only a lament for a lost age is to
badly underestimate what may in the end be nothing more than the extent of
Benjamin's intellectual greed. In that work, in particular, he wants to hold
onto both the past and the future, both the original and its reproduction, both
eternity and time sliced to the tune of 24 frames a second by film. He never
wants to give anything up. He'd have kept one foot in Egypt and the other in
the Promised Land if he could. The collection he aspired to was infinite.
*** *** ***
His fate, the charged field of his openness, and his cardsharp's way of shuffling themes like sacred and profane, have kept artists of all kinds, not just writers, coming back to him. There is for example, an opera waiting to be written about the battle for Benjamin, in which Scholem sings an aria to Palestine, damning Europe, hailing Messiah; Adorno comes in with a bristly recitative; and Lacis wails like a 12-tone Valkyrie. One composer has already written some of this music. In Jewlia Eisenberg's "Trilectic," a song-cycle based on Benjamin's Russian winter, Lacis brags to Scholem: "You'll never get this man to Palestine. I'm the Queen of Moscow and he is mine." As Lacis dares Benjamin to join the Communist Party, he wonders if he is doomed always to think of her when he sees the moon, and dreads being cuckolded by "a Red Army General and the exigencies of this revolution."
Laurie Anderson has
written one of her most haunting pieces about Benjamin's angel, the one he
describes in "The Theses on the Philosophy of History" as being stuck
in reverse, heading ass backwards toward the future. The angel's tale is told
by Hansel, now living in Berlin -- "He had a part in a Fassbinder
film" -- to Gretel -- "a cocktail waitress" -- after she groans:
"Hansel, you're really bringing me down." Hansel explains that he's
tired of their "stupid legend." Anyway, his one and only true love
was the "wicked witch." That witch turns, dream fashion, into a
grounded version of the blighted angel, agent of an ironic God, who facing
"a pile of debris," longs to "to go back/and fix things/ repair
the things that have been broken." He can't though; he's sucked backwards
by a storm blowing from Paradise. That growing pile of debris, intones Hansel,
is called history. And the storm? It's called progress, he sings, stretching
the final word.
Time hasn't come close
to using Benjamin up, and academic discourse can never contain him. In his
recent book, "Breaking Open The Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into The Heart
Of Contemporary Shamanism," Daniel Pinchbeck pairs Benjamin up with
Gurdjieff and with Yage drinkers who, "vomit and shit, shiver and sweat,
and at the same time receive outrageously beautiful visions." Pinchbeck's
Benjamin is a Timothy Leary with a full complement of brain cells and a strong
argument for the ritual high. He escorts Pinchbeck to the Burning Man Festival
and advocates the psychedelic antidote to capitalism. Is Pinchbeck playing fast
and loose with WB? Well, he appears to be unique in attributing a mescaline
trip to him. On the other hand, you'd have to read Benjamin very badly not to
notice the pleasure he takes, both in works for children and in deadly serious
pieces, in turning the secular inside out and finding the sacred.
His grave is empty or
lost, his whereabouts unknown. This most remote and distanced of men, who hid
himself behind layers of "Chinese courtesy," is available, at large
in our culture, peculiarly accessible in his afterlives. I think Zadie Smith
gets him right in her new novel, "The Autograph Man," when she
introduces him to the twenty-first century as "that popular wise
guy." He knows where the cultural goods are stored; he's the one you'll
want to consult about them.
How could I ever have
assumed WB on the treadmill was training only for the past?
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