Monday, January 06, 2003

My charming computer When I turn it on, the start-up screen reads "Check system health OK."  I wonder if this is meant as a gentle request, a command, or is simply of an informative nature, mangled syntax aside.  But yeah, I feel pretty good, thanks for asking.  My computer is nothing more than a hammer, possessed of no intrinsic value. I can use it to build a house, or to destroy one.  This seems the proper relationship of human to machine: everytime I become puzzled by my computer's seemingly wayward behavior, I remind myself that it is the product of minds much like my own, and therefore mine to exert absolute dominion over.  Do not take this attitude with your girlfriend, gentle readers.  Girlfriends are of a infinitely more mysterious and complex nature, and are fully capable of sending one, and one's cat, off to sleep on the couch for two nights in a row.  The wayward tale of the bookstore gift certificates  I've spent them all.  I was going to get a bunch of books about Russian history, because I was interested in Stalin's twenty million. I became curious about whatever process of collective remembering resulted in the seeming-disparity of historical significance between Stalinism and The Holocaust.  I'm not engaging in some purely quantitative measure of horror here, I was just curious about why this is so.  Honestly, I felt guilty because I didn't know anything about Stalinism. But I decided, rather selfishly I guess, that reading about Stalinism would depress me.  Also, I asked for, and received from my girlfriend, the mini-version of Century, which is a photo collection purporting to chronologically detail the significant events of the 20th century.  This turned out to be a book depicting hundreds of maimed, dying, dead, decayed, blown-up, dismembered, and variously ruined and destroyed human beings.   I sat one night and looked at it for about three hours, anyway.  It literally made me think I should kill myself before discovering the cruel depths to which I, personally, am capable of sinking. It was that awful. So, none of that. I've been reading a lot of personal essays lately, and decided to find more that were to my liking.  I was roaming around the bookstore, and picked up a book by W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand.  The first page consisted solely of the following quote, from Nietzsche: "We have Art in order that we may not perish from Truth."  You can understand how this resonated with me, given my experiences detailed in the previous paragraph.   It felt like a dear friend's hand on my shoulder. Walter Benjamin I also bought The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate, ed.  I didn't think I'd read too very many personal essays, but the table of contents listed a number of things I had read indeed, and enjoyed immensely:  Montaigne, Shonagan, Tanizaki, Woolf, Cioran.   I resisted the urges of my at times too-orderly nature, and decided to pick something that sounded really interesting from the table of contents, rather than reading straight through.  I picked two essays by Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," and "Hashish In Marseilles," largely because one topic seemed something I could absolutely relate to, and the other utterly exotic and alien.   So, "Unpacking My Library" begins with Benjamin asking us to join him "among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness."  Now, this put me in mind immediately of a letter, written by Simone De Beauvoir during World War II.  I still remember vividly, although it has been years since I read her letters, her remark that a curtain of darkness had fallen over France, meaning that she and Sartre were forced to re-read the books already in their possession, as nothing new was to hand, and the libraries were closed.  She wrote of this deprivation much more frequently than she did the very real shortages of food, clothing, and electricity they faced.  I laughed too, because right there, on the first page of my frantic run to art's embrace, I stumbled on war.  Convergences I came to Walter Benjamin by way of Laurie Anderson.  She has a very beautiful, haunting song, called "The Dream Before." In this song, she sings of history as an angel, being blown backwards into the future by the wind of progress.  During the time I was constantly listening to that song, I found a very nice book containing these absolutely lovely reproductions of Paul Klee paintings.  The paintings were printed on little 5"x7" plates, then pasted onto the pages of the book.  I've never seen another book like it - I got it for two dollars at an antique store in Round Top, Texas.  I liked one of these paintings, "Angelus Novus," a lot, and I looked at it all the time.  Then, a few weeks later, I picked up, again for two dollars, a book called The Dialectics of Seeing, about Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project.  I bought this book for one reason: As I was paging though it in the bookstore, it fell open to a black and white photo of "Angelus Novus," with the following written beneath:  A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.  His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.   This is how one pictures the angel of history.  His face is turned toward the past.  Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of 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; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.  This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.  This storm is what we call progress. Good night, gentle readers.     10:34:19 PM