(Paul Klee’s, Angulus Novus, 1920)
“There is a picture by Klee called, Angelus Novus. It portrays an angel that appears as if it were about to distance itself from something upon which it gazes. It stares wide-eyed, its mouth gapes open and its wings are outstretched. So must the angel of history appear. It faces the past. Where to us seems a chain of events, it sees a single catastrophe, which heaps up rubble upon rubble and hurls it before its feet. The angel would like to linger, awaken the dead, and piece the broken back together. But a storm from paradise blows this way, it has gotten entangled in the angel’s wings and is so strong the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly drives the angel into the future, to which it turns its back, while the pile of rubble before it heaps up to the high heavens. That which we name progress, is this storm.”
(Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, Thesis #9, 1940, mcduffee trans.)
In fact,
Unlike the military command,
“Eyes, RIGHT,”
The figure eyes left.
“Ready, FRONT!”
Never passing
Never becoming
A concept
An ornament
Or a crime
Loathe to ravage
Unfit to restore
Helpless before the horror
Created to adore
“What watch?”
Late watch!
“Such much?”
Nonstop!
Set the stage!
Time for Outrage!
Empört Euch!
Break cool!
Break fast!
Break rule!
Indignez-vous!
Is this the love the floods cannot Drown, Free of consequence or flaw,
Hatred without violence?
Justice without law?
Ask the angel of history bug-eyed
Before the rubble and the storm
The color of its skin is money
Small and ugly is its form
Get auratic perception,
Get halcyon vision,
Forget oblivion.
Get religion.
Without the “Biblical” twist –
Hessel the son of Sartre says get this
TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.
Dowse the spirit
Suppress complaint
In haste out flank history
Or get erased
Occupy what can be taken
Organize what will be shaken
Rage! Curse! Strike! Unite!
Struggle! Plot! Protest! Fight!
Learn from Him who warns from heaven
This storm is the warning!
Enter Turrell’s twilight arch
Get mythed
Get a fresh start
Make life performance art
“Right oblique, MARCH!”
White Album number nine
Watch Psalm Two in live time
Never before this way seen
Full-HD Plasma-TV
Widescreen
selāh
According to the eternal purpose that God has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, the church now makes known His manifold wisdom to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. Although no one is adequate for this undertaking, all of us are eligible for just such an impossible task through the Son who came to both do and establish the Father’s will. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, to destroy the works of the devil, to abolish death and bring life and immortality to light through the Gospel. He ransomed us from the power of hell. By His precious blood He released us from the vain emptiness of life in this world, which we would have bequeathed to those who came after us as surely as we received it from those who brought us into it. As a sign that this Jesus, descendent of David, is our Savior, the angel said that shepherds would find Him as a newborn baby lying in a manger. A bit out of the ordinary no doubt, but mundane nonetheless.This same Jesus was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by His resurrection from the dead. A fact of another kind, yes, but nevertheless, divinely done.
The Bible teaches we receive the eternal Spirit through whom Christ offered Himself by hearing with faith the word of Christ from which faith comes. There is nothing hypothetical about God’s love for us. He shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Therefore, given that in the Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, beginning and ending in faith, the one who by faith is righteous shall live. As it is written, “The proud one congratulates his soul, his soul is puffed up, it is not right within him; but the righteous shall live by faith.” What we could not do ourselves God has done for us. By sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as a sin offering, He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that whatever He righteously requires might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. Since the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in us.
Rather than rest our souls upon this “kind of nonexperimentally grounded authority (Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism, p. 128)we prefer the contract historically developed in the West, written on paper made from “Rightful Reason” with ink of “kindred wit.” We pretend the wealth of this world belongs to us, to which we “so watchfully cling (William Langland).” We presume to guarantee in lawful society conviction attends convenience by preventing personal contrition from disrupting the general welfare of pleasure owed others. The reductionist mood disorder of the day we call science takes us up into a swelling cloud of information, an expanding mass of our own making, afloat in an atmosphere of assumptions, a fog filled with particles of correlation, the density of which persuades us “that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system (Wired, Jan 2012, p. 105)”; as if producing data was our end in life and making open-ended statements about creation at second-hand was our best bet for outliving those who already died before us. This “useless information” that is “supposed to fire my imagination (Rolling Stones, ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,’ 1965)” applied to history as social commentary by a contemporary educator evaluating the voice of a dead literary critic sounds like this:
“In his essay ‘On the Critique of Violence’ (1921), Benjamin presents the positive utopian framework of his thought. Principally, he did not reject political violence, but analyzed its status and its foundations within the pessimistic context. Accordingly, the struggle between the divine and the mythical serves as the cornerstone for the political struggle and necessarily collides with the law. The law, instead of implementing justice, represents the violence which instituted the law in the first place. However, Benjamin implicitly abandoned the naive revolutionary demand for justice, which is satisfied simply by replacing the present laws with others conceived as being more just. Such a demand appears as a mythical, violent contention, opposing the divine one.
“The pessimistic dimension in Benjamin’s thought is revealed in his claim that the divine alone enables us to speak of ‘justice’. Since there is no place in (secular) history for this dimension – sometimes referred to as ‘messianic’ – his utopianism strongly suggests a transformation of the utopian project. Real change is now conceived as possible only by the overthrow of history. From this perspective, each revolutionary effort to realize utopia – with which he explicitly identifies – is revealed as a vanity of the mythic force that confronts the messianic.” (Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer: From utopia to redemption,” read from http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/Utopia4.html.)
Reading the Bible cuts through the fog of law, science and economics. Listeners see how the Spirit breathes a living pulse into the dead corpse of real history by giving the spirit of the antichrist room to breathe. Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, in another article titled, “The New Anti-Semitism – Educational Challenges,” (2009, available at http://haifa.academia.edu/IlanGurZeev/Papers/117662/The_New_Anti-Semitism_-_Educational_Challenges) reads history displaying a Biblical cast of mind, however, his rendering lacks the vitality of opposition created by the desires of the flesh pitted against the Spirit in tandem with the desires of the Spirit against the flesh. Nonetheless, as this passage shows, he offers a valuable assessment of where we are today (confirmed every semester by every objective listed in every syllabus describing every course in the humanities and the social sciences taught by any college or university professor as a member the westernized global society of higher education):
“Under the flag of ‘the new anti-Semitism’ an attempt is made to unveil the roots of an alleged unfair critique, even hatred, of Israel, which, according to this line of argument, contains so much unconscious and intellectual vitality within the framework of the anti-Israeli rhetoric, which flourishes today in Western academic and intellectual centers, from where it propagates to the public discussion, goodsearching NGO’s, progressive Websites, public opinion polls, and spontaneous reactions in streets from Amsterdam, Dublin, Berkeley, Sydney, Tokyo or Caracas, to the Muslim quarter of Paris, Marseilles, Cairo or Teheran.
“Without underestimating the importance of this question it is my view that what we are actually facing here is a challenge of much higher magnitude, immensely richer, rooted profoundly deeper; a grave threat to mankind as a whole in the present historical moment. Three seemingly disconnected dynamics are incubated in the present moment, and the explosion of their togetherness offers hospitality to the weaker ones among us: globalization of capitalist logic, exile of the humanist killer of God, and the near-possibility of humankind bringing an End to all Life on earth by its own Will to Power; an End for ensuring [making sure, certain, safe] whose realization the human race assembles all its resourcefulness as its most grandiose and everlasting spectacle.
“The ongoing discourse which concerns the new anti-Semitism normally relates merely to the tip of this gigantic-ecstatic educational iceberg. In fact, as the strongest and richest myth of the present historical moment, the new anti-Semitism offers to all an outstandingly fruitful critique, a unique powerful resistance and the last still possible quasi-religious-ecstatic creativity. The new anti-Semitism is a total, and ironically also universal, substitute for the Enlightenment’s telos; an unrestrained ecstatic striving to oppose and destroy the essence, the history, and the aim of the West and its Judeo-Christian foundations.“
Gur-Ze’ev concludes this profound piece by celebrating a never ending end as a true flesh and blood temporal wish that will never come to pass. Although lacking heuristic value, his trans-sensating of ressentiment as an effort at transvaluing the transvaluation of values is indicative of the western academy’s frantic, nearly fully exhausted state of mind brought about by its futile efforts at trying to escape the “flypaper”[1] of a postsecular civil world:
“Holiness and transcendence are possible today through the presence of the infinite in our lives: the near probability of The End, as the final, most glorious manifestation of human progress; as a response-ability to the return from exile of the Gnostic god. A return with its awful truth: no “home-returning” exists. It unites us, all humans, conceptually and existentially, and makes life as an eternal erotic improvisation each-moment-a-new more relevant than ever before.”
How did it come to this? Man as crisis is constant now. This condition according to José Ortega y Gasset, comes but should not stay, when ”the system of convictions belonging to a previous generation gives way to a vital state in which man remains without these convictions. Man returns to a state of not knowing what to do, for the reason that he returns to a state of actually not knowing what to think about the world (Man and Crisis, 1958).” And the church complains, “But you said, ‘Come away by yourselves to a lonely place and rest a while.’” Nevertheless, when He went ashore, He saw a great multitude, and He felt compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and He began to teach them many things. The disciples said, “The place is desolate and it is already quite late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.” But He answered and said to them, “You give them something to eat!”
[1] Robert Musel writes a lovely short description of the death of a House Fly, Musca domestica, brought about by its alighting from its free flight to touch down upon a piece of flypaper. He follows the slow, metaphorically noble death, every moment filled with the sequence of actions instinct dictates the insect must undertake in its futile effort to escape. See Robert Musil, “Flypaper,” trans. by Peter Wortsman in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (London, England: Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 5-7. For me this describes the truly secular death: a b. f. skinner kind of death, the kind of death suffered by those who stubbornly — consciously and vigilantly — insist with Darwin that nothing lives beyond nature, as if there will be no life on the earth when the sea was no more, when science fell silent because the dwelling place of God is with man. Oh, brother Athanasius, He did not ascend to heaven to prepare the angels for our arrival there, rather, He ascended to heaven to prepare men for God living here!
—————————————————————————-
And He who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”
Also He said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true.”
And He said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be His God and he will be My son. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” (Revelations 21:5-8)
*******************************************************
Postscript,
In his work, Indignez-vous! (Empört Euch! Time for Outrage, I have only read the German translation by Michael Kogon, Ullstein, 2011), Stéphane Hessel condemns Israel for committing war crimes and excuses Hamas of any wrongdoing. “Of course,” — that is, following the ordinary way of seeing things — he finds terrorism as “unacceptable.” However, because he judges this inordinately tragic, ultimately apocalyptic conflict following the ordinary way of seeing things, he excuses/explains Palestinian use of it as a reaction by which despair manifests itself in an “intolerable situation.”
Intolérable? Insupportable?
Ah, for one side a burden to be born
as heroic cognoscenti in the arts of survival
(Oh Irony,
your name is Legion!)
for the other,
a stigma as war criminals that is most unbearable,
however,
(see how Israelis are both blamed and banished)
for whom (p. 17)?
I hope Hessel’s children follow up on their obligatory reading to include Richard Goldstone’s article, “Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and War Crimes,” published in the Washington Post (1/4/2011). I register two further grievances before the bench of sanity, rigged I know but nonetheless, the source of justice of last resort on “our” planet. It grieves me that as one of the handful of drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Hessel is dispiritedly silent over the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s systemic efforts at undermining its Article #18:
“Toute personne a droit à la liberté de pensée, de conscience et de religion; ce droit implique la liberté de changer de religion ou de conviction ainsi que la liberté de manifester sa religion ou sa conviction, seule ou en commun, tant en public qu’en privé, par l’enseignement, les pratiques, le culte et l’accomplissement des rites.”
Such beautiful words! Only higher still can the soul climb when it seeks to hear the Gospel. Not only does Hessel pass over in silence this crucial contribution to human understanding, he distorts the very means by which it was given life. Hessel idolizes the French resistance movement, shaping it into a utopian talisman for warding off evil, as the ritual spell we now need to cast for overcoming our present dialectical throes of revolutionary and capitalist wickedness. He ignores the Battle of Stalingrad, 1942, and the Invasion of Normandy, 1944, as essential campaigns of sacrifice for defeating Hitler’s national-socialist universal death march in the name of saving, advancing and fulfilling humanity’s “highest level” of civilization.
In terms of cultural life, of old, for all to see, that is, to better see ourselves and I myself, Jews suffered the consequences of being the children of those who killed the prophets. We in the West are the children of those who called them “Christ-killers” and charged them with the crime of deicide. Our children are the children of those who upon having killed God paid no mind to the madman when he smashed his lantern in the marketplace at what he mistook to be high noon. Whose children will our children’s children be? There is no purity among us. We are born in blood and rubbed in salt before we learn what name others have given us. Did not even Judas Iscariot although used of Satan still do good? Hessel’s mentor too was a man with permanent qualities, displaying our inheritance derived from the choices made in the Garden of Eden. That the man makes the child the existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, lived himself. In doing so he made of himself a dramatic parable, showing us what bad faith is by insisting the child makes the man, declaring, “Existence precedes essence”:
“With his increasing erudition, the young Sartre grew in cynicism about all religion, but he clung to one of his grandfather’s Lutheran concepts, the Holy Spirit. This was a divine muse that inspired a literary ‘elect’, of whom he once thought himself one.” New York Times Obituary for Jean-Paul Sartre, April 16th, 1980
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in The Republic of Silence in 1944: “’Never have we been more free than under the German occupation.’ This is perhaps the kind of ‘memory’ that we stir up at some risk.”
“Existentialism is not despair. It declares rather that even if God did exist, it would make no difference.” “Existentialism and Humanism,” (1945).
Of course, — following the ordinary, ect. — these are but a few words taken from a life of writing. Intolérable! In my defense I must admit I am responding to the manifesto calling for a world movement of resistance against evil, which in its entirety of fourteen pages identifies the conditions found in Palestine to be grounds for being outraged most of all. In all the world? Then indeed, this is both prophetic and most pathetic. Let us all be so marked by such sorrow.
a tip to anyone who has read this far. Beginning from “In fact” through to ending with “selāh,” the text is to be read in the voice we become when reading a children’s storybook to a child. that is the way i wish i had first heard before the rubble and the storm. There is no new Angelus. How truly strange we are (Philippians 3:20, Colossians 3:1-4)! Though we have not seen the Word of God, we love Him. We press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus, denying ourselves, taking up our cross daily to follow Him, serving one another in our right minds, unrestrained and free before God, joyful yet ever sorrowful.
(Paul Klee, The Lamb, 1920)
