ISSN: 1557-2935
Walter Benjamin’s messianic time manifests in fragment, in flashes of the now and the then brought together — redemptive, revolutionary, never enough… Hope and despair are porous at the edges. This piece is a meditation: an attempt to articulate the not-knowing, punctuated by flashes of something like understanding, that marks my relation with this woman, rowing. Her photograph was carried to Auschwitz, recovered and published in Ann Weiss’s The Last Album decades after the war.
She was montage even before I duplicated her photograph, a woman cloaked in familiarity but composed of/as interruption. Just as so much of Benjamin’s extant writing is fragmentary, so much of what can be said about this photograph of a woman rowing can be articulated only in snapshots: I write her in photographic prose. I know her first name, but not her last. I know where she came from — generally — and where her photograph ended up. And as a rower myself, I know the feel of the oars in your hands as you prepare to take off across the water.
This meditation is meant to be (re)written in its reading. There is no “right order”— no correct way to proceed. This is part of the experiment: to read history and art differently, “strolling through it without aim or purpose” (Arendt 21) like Benjamin found solace in the streets of his beloved Paris. It is not a narrative, with pieces that fit neatly together from beginning to end.
I write Benjamin over and through the rower and draw both into the present. The iterations of the montage, taken together, glossed over one another, both a product of history and always already ephemeral in their arrangement, stand in for the angels of the Talmud, invoked by Benjamin in his introduction to a never-realized journal: “According to a legend in the Talmud, the angels — who are born anew every instant in countless numbers — are created in order to perish and to vanish into the void, once they have sung their hymn in the presence of God. It is to be hoped that the name of the journal will guarantee it contemporary relevance, which is the only true sort” (Vol. 1, 296).
The journal’s name was to be Angelus Novus. The backwards facing angel of history, painted by Paul Klee, pushed forward by the storm of progress. The rower was caught in the storm of fascism, in Benjamin’s “catastrophe.” This meditation is an attempted act of rescue, of drawing the angel — the rower — out of the storm.
I am haunted by the absence of her story, and haunted too by my performance of/in her memory… but so too am I hopeful that the radical potential of the fragment, of the rupturing of pasts we think we know, will allow her memory to open as-yet-unimagined futures.
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