(This post is part of a much longer one on Dark Romanticism that I will finish ONE OF THESE DAYS.)
Wojciech Has’ Saragossa Manuscript (1965) is easily on my top ten all-time favorite movies.
Jerry Garcia instigated the restoration of the movie through the Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley. It took them two years to find a complete copy, and Jerry died just a few days before they could inspect it. Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola took up the project, funded it, and saw it through to completion, dedicating the restoration to Garcia.
The movie is a collection of vignettes that loop back on themselves and involve all manner of supernatural, demonic, erotic, Surrealism. The manuscript tells the ostensible life-story of the grandfather of a man seen only briefly at the beginning. By the end of the movie, the final loop-back drives the protagonist (his grandfather?) mad; on the other hand, maybe it just sets in motion the next loop. (This ending was created by Has who has taken Potocki’s book and turned it into a modern, Surrealist masterpiece.)
In Alan Trist’s (head of Ice Nine Publishing, the Greatful Dead’s publishing arm) memoir on Jerry Garica and The Saragossa Manuscript, he notes that Garcia spoke throughout his life of the The Saragossa Manuscript as a favorite movie, and influence.
Scenes like where the guy keeps moving his bed around so that death cannot stand at the foot of it, and dialog like:
– “Captain, the enemy is surrounding us. What shall I do? Close the door fool, it’s drafty. Can’t you see I’m admiring these drawings?” and;
– “Woe to him in his pernicious obduracy refuses to confess his sins …” and;
– “I understand your mind is rebelling against improbable phenomena …”
“Jerry couldn’t get enough of such a take on life. It held some pivotal meaning for him, perhaps its tone and attitude in the face of the dramatic absurdities of life. […] as a work of art its [the movie] texture and structure informed him in ways recognizable in his music. The movement of the film is like the mellifulent line of his guitar playing, always seeking the opening of new doors. Certain modes of Krzysztoí Penderecki’s [musical score] in the most dreamlike visual sequences are identical in feeling and arrangement with the musical “space” to which Jerry always returned with the Grateful Dead.”
(Adapted from DVD liner notes of the Cowboy Pictures release of The Saragossa Manuscript.)
There are fairly extensive liner notes in this release of the DVD that attempt to unravel the story. I do not suggest reading them first – just immerse yourself in the movie and enjoy its surrealistic impact. Then ,if you are so motivated, go back to the plot deconstruction in the liner notes.
Jan Potocki was an 18th c. Polish count, polymath, and adventurer, and dark romantic (he made a silver bullet from melted down household items, had it blessed by a priest and then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head using the bullet). Potocki ‘s book Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The manuscript found in Srargossa) is the basis of movie The Saragossa Manuscript, a dark romantic, Surrealist movie by the Polish director Wojciech. This movie has influenced Luis Buñuel, Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Neil Gaiman.
As the movie opens, there is a war in progress and an officer of one side enters a building to capture an officer of the other side. However, the two become so interested in a old book that is in the building that they forget the war and start going through the book.
His grandfather, a Captain, is on some sort of a quest.
At that time the mentioned area was populated with robbers and gypsies, of whom it was said would eat the corpses of killed wanderers.
Here the movie jumps into the scene in the book …. (The story is told from the point-of-view of his grandfather as a young officer.)
Their destination is an Inn that shows up several times in the loops of the story.
But he is not really prepared for the worst ….
Toward the end of the movie, after a mysterious dinner where the Captain is fed a potion, he sees his double leaving with the two foreign (Islamic / Moorish) beauties that he has met several times (and had an orgy with) in earlier “loops” in the story.
At the end of the movie, he is again / still / for the (altered) first time trying to make the mountain crossing … This time armed with the manuscript thinking that he can make sense of what is going on …
They make it to the Inn that was their original destination ….. where he learns that “two foreign ladies … would like to invite you for supper”
As he confirms his worst nightmare – they are the same women – …..
madness creeps into his eyes…
And he succumbs with maniacal laughter ….
Throwing the book away he rides off madly toward the same gallows seen at the beginning.
Angelus Novus – an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at 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 and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm. – The ninth thesis from Walter Benjamin’s 1940 work, “On the Concept of History.”
(See my full blog post, below.)
Portugal showing Lisbon and Porto (and Madrid, Spain for geographic context).LisbonLisbon, area around Hotel AvenidaLisbon: Hotel Avenida Palace, Plaza Rossio, Café Nicola
Lisbon is a port city, and in addition to excellent Iberian ham common to Spain and Portugal, they have lots of good seafood.
The port area was only a few blocks from my hotel.
This interesting building was next to my hotel:
I wondered what it had been in its better days before the bottom floor was taken over by a Starbucks (very popular with the locals) and a youth hostel.
Well, I was fooled by the facade – it was always thus: This is a train station!
The train platforms are on the top floor of the building. This seems improbable, but Lisbon is hilly and the train tracks are probably well above the harbor area where building was located.
And, of course, the Eurozone crisis has hit Portugal hard and everyone has an opinion.
Unsurprisingly, this translates roughly as
Off the Euro!
Thegovernment is betraying the nation. Bring back the Escudo!
Viva thegovernment of democratic and patriotic unity!
There is a note from Jorge written below the third line of the protest poster:
NO de abril, portugal nao desvia um centavo a ninguém Hoje, deve mais de 400 mil milhoes de euros e paga juros de 9.000 milhoes de euros annalmente. Onde estao os ladroes?
NO (?) April, Portugal [owed] not a penny to anyone.
“Today, it owes more than 400,000 million euros and pays interest 9,000 million euros annually.”
“Where thieves station?” (Google translate.)
[In 2014 Portugal’s National debt was €225 billion. In 1990 it was €37 billion. (http://countryeconomy.com/national-debt/portugal) (Europeans do not use the term “billion,” but rather thousand million.)
So Jorge is not exactly right, though correct in spirit. -wej]
Not that anyone that I noticed – other than Jorge at sometime in the past – was paying much attention. Though Portugal is only a tick or so different from Greece economically, they seem have made a full hearted, and apparently successful, attempt to bring themselves back into alignment with the EU.
Fado
Fado is an interesting music form. The word means “fate” and the song type apparently started in the coastal fishing villages at the beginning of the 19th c. Given the dangers of small craft fishing in the Atlantic, it is not hard to see that there is a chance of fateful loss each time the boats go out, leaving the women and children to long for their men.
The music had evolved into a modern, popular form, but most of the clubs specialize in the traditional form.
I was lucky enough to run across a Fado cabaret near my hotel (Avenida Palace) on the Praca du Rossio square, and so booked dinner and the show. (To book you have to leave a €30 deposit, but when you have dinner they credit the deposit toward dinner.)
Cafe Nicola (Praça Dom Pedro IV 24-25, 1200-091 Lisboa, Portugal, +351 21 346 0579) looks like any of the other, numerous sidewalk cafes on the square, but on the inside it is a quiet, small, and sophisticated cabaret that served very good food along with their “Nights of Fado” show.
Fado (Portuguese:destiny, fate) music can be traced from the 1820s in Portugal, but probably has earlier origins. In popular belief, fado is a form of music characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor. However, in reality fado is simply a form of song which can be about anything, but must follow a certain structure. The music is usually linked to the Portuguese word saudade which means to miss or to long for someone or something. Fado only appeared after 1840 in Lisbon, at that time only fado marinheiro (sailor fado) was known and was sung. Nowadays, there are two main varieties of fado, those of the cities of Lisbon and Coimbra. The Lisbon style is the most popular, while Coimbra’s is the more refined style. http://www.mandolinluthier.com/fado_page.htm At Cafe Nicola, Praca de Dom Pedro IV, 24, Lisbon, Portugal
The food is excellent as well.
The Portuguese Guitar is the primary accompaniment of Fado singers, though there is usually a Spanish guitar as well. The notes of the Portuguese guitar sound to me to be a higher pitch than the Spanish guitar.
The Portuguese guitar is a plucked string instrument with twelve steel strings, six double courses. It has a distinctive tuning mechanism, the famous ‘Preston’ tuner (otherwise known as ‘watchkey tuner’) most notably associated with fado, although it is used in a broader context. Its origin is undoubtedly the ‘english guitars’ introduced into Portugal during the C18-19. There are two distinct kinds of modern Portuguese guitar models: the Lisboa and the Coimbra. A third kind of Portuguese guitar, the guitolão, has recently been added to the family. Visually and most distinctively, the Lisboa guitar can be differentiated from the Coimbra guitar for its larger soundboard and scroll ornament above the tuning machine in place of Coimbra’s tear-drop shaped motif. http://www.mandolinluthier.com/fado_page.htm I asked the musician about the guitar and he said that it was a Lisboa guitarra, but that it was tuned like a Coimbra guitarra because the Fado singers liked that better.
I recorded several of the songs. They usually start with several minutes of unaccompanied guitar music which is then joined by the singer. Listen to one of the songs that I recorded at https://youtu.be/4_Ayej0fzpw
Took the train to Porto. Left from Estação do Oriente, Av. Dom João II. This is a very modern station designed by Santiago Calatrava. Calatrava does a lot of transportation related structures that are futuristic and proactive and part artwork. See http://www.calatrava.com/projects.html?all=yes for a showcase of his projects. He designed the new World Trade Center Transportation hub that New Yorkers seem to love or hate, there is apparently no middle-ground, and that I plan to visit as soon as it is complete (soooon now). He was supposed to design the new light rail hub at Denver Int., but the airport authority got cold feet. I think that they are trying to build a reduced version of his design, but without his help.
My pictures of Estação do Oriente:
Very, very nice (even though the roof leaked).
Oporto (Porto)
Porto, PortugalPorto around the Ponte Luis I bridge: Hotel Intercontinental at top, Porto Cálem at bottom.
Visited Porto for the annual TERENA networking conference (TNC15) which is the main European research and education networking meeting. Stayed at the Hotel InterContinental just south of the downtown area and about a 10 minute walk from the river.
Porto, Portugal: Looking north at the Praça da Liberdade from the Hotel InterContinental.Porto, Portugal: Looking east along Praça da Liberdade. The front of the Hotel InterContinental on the right.
Oporto (Porto) is a very pleasant city. It is on the Rio Douro a few miles up from the Atlantic, and a breeze blows up the river keeping the area at a perfect temperature (at least in early June when I was there).
Café, Rio Doruo, just west of Ponte Luis I I think that this cafe was a pop-up. Whole thing was modular, even to the toilets. Walls were 6’x6′ fiber board pieces with special hardware to assemble them into wall sized units.
There are dozens of tiny river front cafes on Rio Douro in the area just west of Ponte Luis I bridge. This modern cafe was not typical – most of the cafes were in the old warehouses that were 25 ft. above the water – for unloading.
Typical cafe on Rio Doruo, just west of Ponte Luis I bridge.
The food in these little cafes – at least the several that I samples – ranges from good to excellent and the prices are quite reasonable.
Porto, Portugal: Grilled herring, water front café just west of Ponte Luis I.
The wine is also quite good and very reasonably priced.
Porto, Portugal: The Rio Douro wine growing region is the third oldest named region in Europe after Chianti and Tokay. A very good bottle of wine at a restaurant cost €10 and an excellent one €15. I suppose that we do not see this great wine in the US very much because a lot of it goes to making port.This is the meal start: a good, local soft cheese, olives, white port, and bread. Nice!
A different meal was grilled octopus. Very tender, unlike some that I have had. On a bed of some sort of pilaf.
At least this part of the riverfront – labeled “historic” on some of the tourist maps – is very picturesque.
Rio Doruo, just west of Ponte Luis I bridge.Porto, Portugal: Looking east along the Rio Douro on a Sunday afternoon.Porto, Portugal: Looking east along the Rio Douro at the Ponte Luis I. Note that the river level deck is the auto roadway and the top deck is for trains. Porto is a bit like Portland, Oregon: It is built on the sides of the fairly deep ravine that the Rio Douro has carved out. Roadways come down to the river, but the trains stay on the plane above the river.At the north end of Ponte Luis I bridge where the road starts the climb up to town.
Evening on and about the riverfront.
Porto, Portugal: Looking west along the Rio Douro at the waterfront cafes.
On the south bank of the river are all the big port blenders and exporters. Many British firms because the British “discovered” port in the late 16th c. and started importing it. Eventually they became the big blenders and exported in Portugal. (They did not invent port – it was made in monasteries along the Rio Douro long before the British showed up.) You can just make out the marquee signs of the big port houses: Taylor’s, Offley, Dow’s, Sandeman, Warre’s, Cockburn’s, Ferreira.
Walking up from the river toward town ….
One of four windows of a port shop.
Along the river front.
I drooled over a ship model in at crafts store by the river. (Don’t think it was for sale.)
The cafes are in old waterfront warehouses. The cargo ships anchored in front and off-loaded. The narrow walkway is used by the cafes for outdoor seating. The ring set in the walk was used to tie up the ships. It is about 18″ in diameter and sticks up a bit. The tourists are always tripping on them.Tie rings for the lugers while unloading at the warehouses.
Walking down river (West) toward the conference center:
As I walked down to the Pub this evening, I was astounded to see, in twilight, two bright “stars” and, I think a third one in a line to the upper left. (I can just see it if I use the trick of looking slightly to the side of the object so that it is imaged by the intensity sensitive rod cells in the retina.)
Pulling up Pocket Universe on my iPhone and aiming it at the the two bright stars shows:
(The top center labeled object is an annotation – everything else is the sky. pUniverse tells me that brightness are Venus: -5.3 magnitude, Jupiter: -1.8, and Regulus: +1.35)
(Steve L. comments on my Facebook post: “On June 30th, the angular distance between Jupiter and Venus will be the smallest in about 2000 years. They will look almost like one. It’s not to be missed.“)
An an aside, the celestial magnitude system has the brightest objects with negative values (sun is -25) and the dim objects positive (+6 is about the limit of human vision).
Lightening up the image and labeling the objects gives:
The iPhone 6 camera is at or better sensitivity to color images than my eye, but not as sensitive as using the rods in my eye to image: I am pretty sure that I can see the faint object about half way between Jupiter and Regulus, but it does not show up distinctly in the enhanced iPhone image. (By the way, the enhancing, cropping, and labeling were all done on my iPhone using my favorite image program (after trying half a dozen others): Photogene.)
While visiting Florence (Italy) for an exhibition of Hellenistic Bronze I spent a day wondering around the city and ran into the Ospedale degli Innocenti. I had heard of the Hospital of the Innocents and assumed that it was a museum – which was only partly true.
(The entire facility is under going a major renovation.)
Ospedale degli Innocenti was built between 1419 and 1445, and commenced operation in 1445. Its operation was described in the museum:
“Foundlings were taken in at the Innocenti, as indeed they were everywhere else in medieval Tuscany, via a stone column, akin to a holy water stoup, set outside the loggia on the facade, where they were left.
In the course of the 16th century they began to be taken in through a window that communicated with the women’s church, covered by a grate large enough only for newborn babies to be passed through.
On the other side of the wall was a small “hut” which became synonymous with the place where the children were abandoned and has been called a “crib” ever since.
In 1660 the grated window or crib, popularly called the “wheel”, was moved to the loggia’s northernmost end, towards what is now Via della Colonna. The wheel remained in use until 1875, when it was walled up. It is possible today to see how the tiny grate only allowed very small children to be passed through it. There was a bell which a person leaving a baby could ring to alert the wet-nurses on duty inside.”
The Ospedale operated as an orphanage for nearly 600 years, and the number of children it served is indicated by its archives:
Ospedale degli Innocenti, archives
(Compare this with the Long Room of the Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin where the Book of Kells is kept:)
Though I am not sure that it is still an active orphanage in the original sense, the Ospedale is still very much an operational children’s facility:
Here is an interior courtyard and the building decoration that has become the icon of the Ospedale (you can see a faint outline of it in the above sign).
This exhibition is a joint project of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angles, Foundazione Palazzo Strazzi, Florence, and the National Galley of Art, Washington, DC in collaoration with the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana.
Well, no, and I will comment more below about comparing Hellenistic sculpture with, e.g., Rodin, below.
Here are some of my favorites from the exhibition.
Power
The classical, ideal Greek male body: the athlete. (Larger than life size.)
Another athlete (fragments of a discus thrower).
(Life size.)
Pathos
A weary Herckles. (1/4 life size.)
By “pathos” they frequently mean “the weight of life” as reflected in the furloughs and lines on the face.
Portraiture
They also do portraiture.
An aristocratic boy.
(Though most photos of these statues are face-on, many of these – especially this one – look even more life-like in profile or 3/4 view. That was definitely the case for this one. (I could not sneak a photo because the were photo cops in every room of the exhibition. I had aleady been caught taking the discus thrower photo, and was afraid they would throw me out if they caught me again. )
BTW, this exhibit will be at the Getty in a few months and I will try and organize an expedition to see it.
Aletheia / Veritas: The New Canon, Gianfranco Adornato
The exhibition catalogue contains a number of essays, one of which talks about the ways in which Hellenistic art explored “explored new iconographic themes and sculptural models in a manner that was not different from what was happening in other fields, such as literature, in which the poetic canons underwent alterations, changes, and inversions. Hellenistic works of art explore and expand a thematic repertoire that was completely foreign to the mentality of the citizen of the Classical polis. We see terror in the gaze of Marsyas (fig.) modest and intimate poses in a crouching Aphrodite, erotic abandon in the position of a sleeping Faun, bitter smiles on the faces of toothless old men, affectionate gestures directed towards plump children like an Eros fast asleep on a rock (cat. 20), skeletal and deformed bodies of the diseased and of dwarfs (fig.). These are portraits that faithfully reproduce facial features playing upon the emotional and psychological feeling of involvement and integration the work of art can arouse in the observer. (“Aletheia / Veritas: The New Canon” by Gianfranco Adornato)
Emaciated man, early Imperial Roman copy of a Hellenistic statue, c. second century BC. Bronze, h 11.5 cm. Washington, DC, Dumbarton Oaks Collection, inv. no. 47.22. (From “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World” by Jens M Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin. Exhibition catalogue, “Aletheia / Veritas: The New Canon” by Gianfranco Adornato.)
Hanging Marsyas, detail of the face, Imperial Roman copy of a late Hellenistic sculptural group; from the Auditorium of Maecenas, mid-second century AD. Marble, h 266 cm. Rome, Musei Capitolini, inv. no. 1077. (From “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World” by Jens M Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin. Exhibition catalogue, “Aletheia / Veritas: The New Canon” by Gianfranco Adornato.)
Boxing dwarf, second century BC or early Imperial Roman bronze. h 11.1 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. RES.08.32k. (From “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World” by Jens M Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin. Exhibition catalogue, “Aletheia / Veritas: The New Canon” by Gianfranco Adornato.)
Comparison
Looking at Rodin as a modern counterpoint, his focus was less on the idealized stereotypes/idealizations of the Hellenistic sculptures and more on capturing the Gestault / psychological essence of the situation:
The Kiss
The (condemned) Burghers of Calais (coming out to meet their fate and deliver the keys of the City to the British.)
However, Rodin was fully capable of the highly realistic sculpture of the ideal form, as in the Age of Bronze.
When the “Age of Bronze” was first exhibited in Paris, the “establishment” artists accused him of taking a plaster mold of the young man and casting it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rodin’s model was a mature, 22 yr old Belgian soldier. The artistic result was a perfect/idealized 17 year old boy.
(One does wonder if Rodin ever saw “Terme Ruler” in Rome:)
Terme Ruler. Statue of a Macedonian Prince, from the Quirinal, Rome, third-second century BC. Bronze, h 222 cm. Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, inv. no. 1049. (From “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World” by Jens M Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin. Exhibition catalog.)
RA’s Bronze
Several of the works in Power and Pathos also appeared in the Royal Academy’s monumental exhibition “Bronze,” that I will talk about in another post. This was an exhibition that was unique in its scale and scope, and it will probably never be repeated. (The estimated value of the art on display was $1 to $2 billion and no one would insure it. The British Government agreed to indemnify the exhibition, but the major lenders did not really believe this. In the end that pulled it off and the result was astounding.)
Lonely figure: François Hollande, with approval ratings of 20%, is the most unpopular president in French postwar history.
A desolate image broadcast live this week to a French public that has all but despaired of his presidency summed up the plight of François Hollande.
Flown by helicopter to the windswept island of Sein off the rocky west coast of Brittany for a ceremony to commemorate the liberation of France from Nazi occupation 70 years ago, Mr Hollande stood to give his speech unprotected from a lashing Atlantic rainstorm.
No presidential huissier, no aide-de-camp, not even an alert public relations official stepped forward with an umbrella. Instead, the most unpopular president in French postwar history was left alone and bedraggled against a bleak island backdrop, the rain obscuring his spectacles, soaking his hair and running down his neck.
“Avec moi, le déluge,” joked the satirical newspaper Canard Enchaîné on its front page…..
This article lead me to digging for information about Île-de-Sein, which turned up Mário Gonçalves’ Quest for Tule blog on remote islands. His July 2010 post is about Île-de-Sein and I have taken the liberty of reproducing it here together with a comment on the origin of “Thule” and an additional picture at the end. – wej
Thule (Greek: Θούλη, Thoúlē – Pytheas, 320 BC) also spelled Thula,Thila, or Thyïlea, is, in classical European literature and maps, a region in the far north. Though often considered to be an island in antiquity, modern interpretations of what was meant by Thule often identify it as Norway, an identification supported by modern calculations. Other interpretations include Orkney, Shetland, andScandinavia. In the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Thule was often identified as Iceland or Greenland. Another suggested location is Saaremaa in the Baltic Sea.The term ultima Thulein medieval geographies denotes any distant place located beyond the “borders of the known world”. Sometimes it is used as a proper noun (Ultima Thule) as the Latin name for Greenland whenThule is used for Iceland. – Wikipedia
Sein island (Île-de-Sein)
Brittany, France
Now this Ultima Thule in France´s Finistère may not be so remote and northernly as others I have reported here, but it is surely magic in its wilderness, situation and life style. Getting there is not a hard adventure, but living there is.
This piece of rock is certainly the strangest island off the coast of Brittany, one of the six Celtic nations.
Île-de-Sein is a french islet in the Atlantic Ocean, 10 km off the extreme northwest of Finistère, 2 km long for at most a few hundred metres wide. Nowhere does it rise more than six metresabove the surrounding ocean.
Lying on the sea routes going south from the English Channel, Sein is well known for the dangers of its waters. The Chaussée de Sein, a vast zone of reefs, stretches for more than thirty miles from east to west, requiring numerous lighthouses, to prevent increasing the large numbers of shipwrecks in the past.
The Island of Sein has been inhabited since prehistoric times, and it was reputed to have been the very last refuge of the druids in Brittany. Some menhirs can be found there.
Three hundred islanders continue to make their living from the sea, gathering rainwater and seaweed and fishing for scallops, lobster and crayfish.
Quai des Paimpolais
The village
In order to be protected from the sea and storms, the village has very narrow streets, a real labyrinth. The streets twist and turn against the wind, and in most places are built only wide enough to roll a barrel. Only bicycles are allowed.
Details of sea life decorate most houses, in the dominating blue colour.
On the blackboard – “croissants available by command for Christmas and New Year’s Eve”. That shows how isolated the island is from mainland.
Phare de la Vieille
One of the most famous French lighthouses, this tower is built on a rock that half way from mainland to Île-de-Sein. In big sea storms, waves crash against the lighthouse and seem to swallow it – but La Vieille always keeps working.
`Come back!’ the Caterpillar called after her. `I’ve something important to say!’
“The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’
‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’
‘I don’t see,’ said the Caterpillar.
‘I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’ Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.’
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Chapter V
Advice from a Caterpillar
Salvador Dali Alice in Wonderland – Illustrated Book 1969
Paul Klee’s 1920 painting Angelus Novus, which Benjamin compared to “the angel of history”
IX
My wing is poised to beat
but I would gladly return home
were I to stay to the end of days
I would still be this forlorn
— Gershom Scholem, “Greetings from Angelus” [tr. Richard Sieburth]
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees on single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at 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 and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm. /1/
/1/The ninth thesis from Walter Benjamin 1940 work, “On the Concept of History,” Gesammelte Schriften I, 691-704. SuhrkampVerlag. Frankfurt am Main, 1974. Translation: Harry Zohn, from Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 2003), 392-93. Sholem’s poem on the Klee painting was written for Benjamin’s twenty-ninth birthday — July 15, 1921. Sieburth’s translation is from Gershon Scholem, The Fulnness of Time: Poems (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2003).
WEJ: From a note on U. At Buffalo Green Integer web site for (somewhat improbably?) an opera:
“Brian Ferneyhough’s opera Shadowtime, setting Charles Bernstein’s poetic and complex libretto of seminal 20th-century philosopher Walter Benjamin’s last days and a phantasmagorical descent to the underworld. In its seven scenes, Shadowtime explores some of the major themes of Benjamin’s work, including the intertwined natures of history, time, transience, timelessness, language, and melancholy; the possibilities for a transformational leftist politics; the interconnectivity of language, things, and cosmos; and the role of dialectical materiality, aura, interpretation, and translation in art. Beginning on the last evening of Benjamin’s life, Shadowtime projects an alternative course for what happened on that fateful night.
Opening onto a world of shades, of ghosts, of the dead, Shadowtime inhabits a period in human history in which the light flickered and then failed.”
In the opera libretto is a summary of the plot that contains a clear reference to Klee’s painting. From the description of scene 7:
“Stelae for Failed Time” has two over-lapping layers. The first is a reflection on time and uncertainty in the context of historical recrimination and erasure:
Letter from Herman Göring to Reinhard Heydrich that lead to Heydrich chairing the 1942 Wannsee Conference, which discussed plans for the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. Though the chain of command went from Heinrich Himmler to Heydrick, Göring was appointed Reichsmarschall by Hitler in 1941 making him senior to all other military commanders.
The world’s most terrifying letter – Göring to Heydrich on the final solution. The Topography of Terror museum, Berlin, 2007 (W.E.Johnston)
Western Marches 