A moving prism

» A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying I am Federico Garcia Lorca risen from the dead– literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.  - From Publication date, Franz Wright

Angelus Novus, Paul Klee, 1920 My wing is ready to fly I would rather turn back For had I stayed mortal time I would have had little luck. – Gerhard Scholem, “Angelic Greetings” There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future,...

Zdzisław Beksiński » One can reflect on this situation. It can happen that someone is very close to us, not close: the walls have fallen. Sometimes still very close, but without relation: the walls have fallen, those that separate and also those that serve to transmit signals, the language of prisons. Then one must again raise a wall, ask for a little indifference, that calm distance by which lives find equilibrium.  A naive desire that takes form after having already been realized. But from such an astonishing approach to an other, one retains the impression that there was a brief moment of luck; a moment bound not to the favor of the look that may have been exchanged, but to something like a movement that may have preceded us both, just before our encounter. At this instant it seems that he was truly our companion in an infinite and infinitely deserted space where, by a marvelous chance, he had suddenly appeared at our side; so it was and so it was going to be, inexplicable,...

» I want to say it plain and clear: I go down into hell and I see things that do not disturb the peace of others. But be careful. Hell is rising toward the rest of you. It's true that it dreams its own uniform and its own justification (sometimes). But it's also true that its desire, its need to hit back, to assault, to kill, is strong and wide-ranging. The private and risky experience of those wh o have touched "the violent life" will not be available for long. Don't be fooled. And you are, along with the educational system, television, your pacifying newspapers, the great keepers of this horrendous order founded on the concept of possession and the idea of destruction. Luckily, you seem to be happy when you can tag a murder with its own beautiful description. This to me is just another one of mass culture's operations. Since we can't prevent certain things from happening, we find peace in constructing shelves where to keep them. - The last interview with...

TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy man of men!  Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough Within thy hearing, or thy head be now  Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;— O miserable Chieftain! where and when Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow: Though fallen thyself, never to rise again, Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies; There’s not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.  ___William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

The dragon devouring the companions of Cadmus by Hendrick Goltzius » These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? "We"—this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and  how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right. — Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Empire | Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri | page 103 Empire | Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri | page 103