In case you didn't know DeKooning took the angel of history as his model for woman 1952.The left eye is wall eyed, the right looks at the viewer divided. Two molars hang upside down with gaps between. The eyes and eye sockets come out of the forehead like light bulbs. Gershom Scholem said the hair was scrolls of the secret wisdom of angels. Geoffrey Hartman kidding calls the Klee fingers candelabras and says the hair is up in curlers. "Thick candelabra fingers and heady excrescences, curlers." "I cannot make out extended wings and staring eyes," says Hartman, "I see a grotesque being, disymmetric, demon rather than angel, helplessly reading itself." (A Critics Journey, 198). The bird toes support that angel-demon take, "kakangelic," as if this angel brings the bad news (kaka) "like Freud about the psyche, and offers no cure except through the very activity-analysis- which reveals this news." (Hartman, Critic's Journey 212).
What is the bad news Freud brings? Civilization is the evil, the in loco parentis we wish to die. The angel is its nature concealed. [And then, the question comes, what will we have, chaos? The answer is no, redemption.] It is all taught esoterically and not, for history is hidden behind draperies of pretended ignorance, as if the occult were not the mainspring of civilization from Egypt and before and the new world ovum not a geographic entity in Washington DC and the Vatican. Rediscover it in daily life, the colossal uprooting and destruction of the existing order, where there is no progress in its history leading to redemption. Redemption is a breaking in, a revolution, not a reason, the total and complete overthrow of all the powers of the world, the reinstitution of every original thing, the return of all things to their origin. Klee's angel is the pure azure of spirituality to be destroyed. All illumination is deception. Mystical experience is a fraud. The Angel Novus version of Benjamin is a picture of this occult reality itself. The in-H-man is the new man conquered by the angel whose perfect nature is the recitation of old hermeneutics, Satan, angel of the Talmud, who hides his Theses of History and the Philosophy in the personal reflections of enormity and the subversion of humanity, in camps and propaganda which hold in bondage. It is no self. It is a dragon ornament, star boys bounding to take human beings to make them happy. It makes Star Boys happy to kill a man.
Answer, that civilization is demonic and we wish for its death. Oedipus wishes for the death of the father says Freud
As the angel is being blown away, out to sea in a posture of surrender, hands up. it gets to watch the implosion of our history from Troy, Rome and Jerusalem and before. More bad news, wreckage on wreckage, we imagine the man in his rowboat blown about below on a dark sea at the bottom of a rectangle of history of storm clouds, swirled with twisted faces, supercharged with Babylonian Bohemian Grove-Mammon-Ishtar hordes. Then good news, in this scenario, suddenly the whole is rent down the middle, destroyed by a figure of light, a man. This is not in the painting nor in Klee's Benjamin's Scholem's mind. History present and past is the allegory where eternal life takes shape.
Our acceptance of the transference of inner speech is like a dream of odd complacencies surgically removed like some body part and kept in a jar, a spent meniscus, a clam in amber. We both view this and are it.
Singing
The Patriarch Benjamin was the last child of Isaac born after the Angel's touch in the groin. Whether the angel's touch in the hollow was at the place where the testes descend, hence a inguanal hernia affecting the life of son Benjamin, the son born after, "little Benjamin, with their ruler, the princes of Judah" (Ps 68.27) was influenced by the angel at a second remove. As Benjamin was born after Jacob's wrestling, so Walter Benjamin took his identity after Klee's angel. Identical, not identical with himself, new name or old, audible / inaudible like the secret spelled in archetypal form, the changing mask of the Angel Novus was worn over the face of the man.
Its name projects itself on a
picture which doesn't reveal the true name in Benjamin, the child father of the
man, the child primal in expression and true. Peeling back the cultural history
of nations, Wordsworth's year in France produced his insight that
it's odd the French so supported the American revolution when they
deconstructed their own. Somehow this implicates the whole nature of iambic
verse and whether the English language was a turning of natural rhythms into
artificial ones. But of the song rhythms, whoever THOUGHT OF SHAKESPEARE AS A
WALTZ?
Scholem says "Benjamin
interrupted the angel from the singing of his hymn" and prevented his
passing away. Such songs are not real, but mere figments of fun taken as
religion, as if Benjamin locked the angel in his room on the wall and said, I
will not let thee go unless thou bless me, and sits down under the picture on
the wall.
But dawn is coming and the angel must sleep after singing. Benjamin is worried that the angel will miss its divine appointment, which Benjamin himself prevents in his sitting. You can say Jacob did it, but Benjamin also prevented the angel singing if he turned him into Samael, or Satan in the old text, as if there were any doubt as to who Satan was, the angel of light hiding in darkness, which the darkness comprehended not and could not prevent. It needed the True Light that lights every one who comes into the world. To compare these thoughts with a picture on the wall that never did anything except decay, even if preserved now in Jerusalem, Benjamin is Jacob and his Agesilaus Santander of that secret name cannot sing. Jacob changed to Israel is just opposite Benjamin changed to Satan. No wonder these angels won't give their real names. Benjamin's frustrations with women, unrequited, unconsummated made him divide the angel in two, male and female he uncreated them out of some Kabbalah legend.
"The angel and his feminine form in the figure of the beloved did not know each other though they had once been most intimately adjacent" (Scholem 220). One street over, in Heidelberg, Berlin and Munich, the angel Satan "wanted to destroy Benjamin through his feminine form." The Mt. Hermon Watchers had taught the angelic imposters to pretend they were women. Scholem gives their name but we will spare them. Scholem/Benjamin finds the Angelus his emblem, projects his unrequited love, his divisions upon it. This is a hermetic allegory really, division of the paths, separation of the poles restored by the alchemical marriage. Angelus lay in wait on the life path of both. Patience, is it cunning? If the angel is faithful, Satan is not, if the angel is faithful Benjamin is not. It's all coming to an end for Angelus. Once descended from heaven, held under sway, the Satanic character, claws and knife wings proved in lore, resembles everything in this current state with which it has to part. Benjamin going over the Pyrenees with a black brief case, leaving two cases with Batille, with the angel rolled up inside, never to be seen by him again, is Satan, at last! Build the pyre from a heap of combustible material, especially one for burning. Walter Benjamin goes to his apparent suicide. Behind the surface his destiny is to sing at end of day or not to sing the hexenlied.
Benjamin discovers in finite things the infinite depth of allegories but cannot step over or into, any more than he can consummate the woman, the lieder of life. Consummate the woman who is no symbol to contact like a metaphysical being, but a woman and person like him who longs to surrender, but he only thinks it. They call this imagination the epicene world where the angel takes up residence in the vanished things that affront it daily. The two versions under knife attack are an interesting case for our best analysis, "tied eye to eye." His hair in the painting, like scrolls of learning in his briefcase, suggests the angel's thoughts are scrolls, his curls are cursives, his message of the mind in his hair there inscribes, "he has been pushed forward from the future and goes back into it" (Scholem 225). This documents the peril of intellect that imagines but does not engage, is alienated from the angel, man or woman. "That way into the future from which he came" is dissolution for the angel who wants to return home, if that is a home of fire. If you go home you sing and then you die. It sounds like life. I came, I sang, I died. What else did you there? I had "the conflict in which lies the ecstasy of the unique" (Scholem 226). Scholem says, I'm turning black, "my wing is ready for a flight, I'm all for turning back." Little poem, little poem, going home. Often the angel just means himself. We speak in riddles between the once only and the yet again.
Poems were guardian
angels to Kabbalists. If Paul Klee's angel was what they said it would be, the
angel of Satan, that fallen angel who represented the secret self with the
hidden name was opposed by its own angel the way Balaam and his ass were. Do
angels have angels? Well at least they have a LORD. The Satanic mortgage that
fell from the stars "assumed Satanic features: though more the expression
Satanic knowing, contentment, serenity." To these delusions everything had
a guardian angel, if only a joke. Hence Mona Lisa revised comes
compromised with "the indescribably beautiful face of a human being [to]
appear as Satanic features with a half-suppressed smile." As the wrinkle
of reason, or the self important dreamer in 4D printing today changes the
portrait of Dorian Grey to meet the real politik, when did Benjamin realize the
angel of history was the Angel Novus of Satan? "His capacity of
concentration on spiritual matters was of miraculous intensity" (Scholem
214). What we call self absorbed dementia he calls concentration. The image of
Klee has nothing to do with Benjamin's meditation of Satan or the Kabbal or how
syllables of a word combine to individual letters to make anagrams. In the
second printing two names occur, Spartan king Agesilaus and a city of Spain, Santander
somehow spelled Satan. Agesilaus Santander signed to Angel Satan "[Der
Angelus Satanas] identical with Lucifer. But the first nature died. I die
daily. The concept of two names and two natures keeps the commandments of Sodom against all earthly
creatures who allow it and certainly those who meditate thereon.
Secret Names
The mystic intuition that connects clairvoyant theories, as if reason were stranded on a bridge admiring the beautiful Lucifer, whose appearance cancels, conceals and reveals the beautiful, is far from experience. This angel ex cathedra thinks the mystical is God, connecting the soul with the angel when the angel is not any way a likeness of the soul. These deceptions need Deliverance, but it is in the personal, not the social or religious that Providence names itself. Those who give secret names to their children do not tell them before the time of their maturity. They are prescient it is hoped, for it is He Who IS Above All Things who gives a new name out of a bag of fine white quartz. Parents remain a citadel of the past effects of the child who is made to wander in the world without inhibition, but surrender to those futures who the parent, like the Angel Novus, observes blown backward from their birth. They are not named for angels. The befallen think a man divided into male and female seeks reunification, which preoccupies marriage and family, but reunity is only realized in the greater catching up which the angels might hope to know but don't.
Turning all this mystical
pious and impious thought into the secret Ad Depravitorim is a way of
joining true and false, angel and man. Just the thing the higher powers seek,
then marry it to the art of stars. This is the future which will belong to
those who live from the forces of the cosmos. "The angel had a secret name
[or a legion of them], but it is hard to get account of their names lest they
be invoked or cast out: "unexpectedly the human person of Benjamin now
changes into the angelic-Luciferian nature of the angel in the picture by Paul
Klee, a nature connected so unfathomably deep and magical with his own"
(Scholem 218).
Uprooting
New person, old person, there is only one character, not three in the angel, himself and the new. All chimera, deception, division, altered. "Did Benjamin, when he first saw the angel, and Klee's picture affected him like a revelation of his own angel, journey back with the latter into the future that was his origin" (Scholem 227)? Out of this the Frankfurt school was born, the observation of a realm of spiritual terror where advertising was a history written by the vanquished out of blind spots that escaped the dialectic. Surely some dialectic is at hand when Klee's Angelus Novus is the angel of history who shows today as Marvel Comics. The sins of the time are discovered in the hidden. Oh who hath he smitten?
In Benjamin's encounter with Satan, his angel, and Klee's, and Scholem's, and everyone who reputedly has one on the cover of their notebook, undergoes an illumination of himself. Busted, there stands Benjamin's personal angel "between past and future and causes him to journey back" (Scholem 232), turned into the angel of history whose fourteenth thesis is, Origin is the Goal, but the storm blows him back and back. History fails to enter through the gate. "What prevents the angel? The storm from Paradise? No, the real redemption. "It is a matter of dispute whether one can speak here-as I am rather inclined to do-of a melancholy, in deep desperate view of history for which the hope that the later might be burst asunder by an act like redemption or revolution continuous to have about it some thing of that leap into transcendence which these theses seem to deny" (Scholem 235). Benjamin and Scholem end up transfunctioned, another name of Satan. For there is no division of Messiah.
"What kind of novum, then, does this evangelist bring?" Much of Benjamin's view could be questioned, revisited.
Satan getting in here has more to do with thought than the art. Thinking makes it so. Benjamin wrote a spurious little Journal of Angelology that Scholem calls a dear little demonology of "devils who bring an intentional banality [like Nazi murderers] to conceal they are devils. Cubs with a lizard body, banally corpulent." Benjamin was going to edit a magazine of various and sundry fictions called Angelus Novus with the myth omnipresent in all these writers that Midrash angels are so ephemeral that once they sing they die, a romantic notion, to cease upon the midnight with no pain like Keats' Nightingale. Keats said of Shakespeare that he led a life of allegory. We should be glad he didn't profess it was a life of fraud. Keats could probably do the voices of others too, since he was able to imagine what it was to be in another’s head and to speak just like them, that is, excluding Shelley. There is something of a chameleon in Benjamin too, in this myth of the Angelus Novus and its interpretation which came to have a life of its own.
What is called messianic interpretation reflects the personal effects of wars that result from unbelieved manipulation. In this they present an object lesson blissfully unaware before the fact of what history will be. For Benjamin and Scholem the causes would be scorned. It's really only possible to talk about the idea of history, totalitarianism, genocide, and not the specific acts or persons who commit to serving them. These are as hidden and unspoken as subway riders who chew on their own arms. We do not likely know anyone of this 9th circle, otherwise our sons would be waking up in cold sweats. History is diabolical in that all particular cases of its counterfeits must be rejected, not only because they are unbelievable but because even so, who can bring the offenders to account? So we are intended to think. Are you going to indict the kings and queens of Inland? Are you going to abjure the Greek gods? That leaves us with the lives of men and women confused by every aspect of society, religion and their own foibles. The angel in other words is viewing what it itself has made. The angel shall be taken as malign in this view, that also codes its hermeneutic in nearly any work of art and links it to some poem or life to dissemble. If we allow that to seem innocent is to be sinister and destructive, how else could the Angelus Novus, the angel of history so called, appear on the covers of notebooks as a symbol of the new world order?
What is the bad news? We are about to hear it, a piety that wrestles the suspended fallen angel in the unconscious.
What must the libido of science be if it wishes for the death of the world? If Freud is right, and this bad news is the unconscious of our state, it is acceptable that Klee modeled the angel after Adolf Hitler who lived in Munich in 1920. Hitler was giving speeches in beer halls then and it is sometimes argued the master of this dubious angel of the unconscious is Hitler.
There is going to be
an angel registration after all, so be sure to get its name. We wrestle this
thing into submission when we realize what it is we struggle against and its
demonic thought. We bring every thought into captivity to the
obedience of Christ against whom the devils have no answer. It's not that the
death of Oedipus might have been ours, or that his curse comes on us at birth,
but that the death of Christ is ours and the blessing that comes on us from his
birth enables our thought to go beyond the bad news Freud and science bring.
Imagine all this and more as
Benjamin and Scholem did in a painting called the New Angel. But the painting
cannot be said to truly exist, for the commentary is the thing and not the
work. So we come to the outward edge of understanding the new angel. It
is made with words, even if it "has claws like the angel and knife-sharp
wings" (Scholem 205). It is an inversion of the
meta-theological stance of a Marxist rabbi and occult church father.
They say the angel pulls its partner, a female emanation, along into a future, but backwards, while looking at the past and the mounting rubble, for historical rubble grows greater as time progresses.
In its maturity the (counterfeit)
Novus name that should not have been given is said to join the life forces,
male and female, but it loses the gift of being human. No man now and if not,
what? Armored and encased, a picture on the wall? Considered a self portrait of
the masculine, it could be anyone. "The new angel passed himself off as
one of these before he was prepared to name himself" (Scholem 207), but
the counterfeit name once given is fatal, as though both male and female, angel
and man, project into the angel the image and the world. These are what the
angel let go of forever in order to be called by its new name to be revealed. In
this absence it exists once removed. But fire from the quartz is struck for the
new human, the new man not the angel, whose "regeneration, at least in its
commencement, is a work of the mind, and when it first takes place, it has the
lusts of the flesh, yea, all the evil inclinations to war against; and even
ignorance itself, together with the temptations and allurements from
without" (Abraham Godshalk, A Description of the New Creature. 1838). Who
pulls along the new, the old or the old made new, the art on the wall or the
words it describes? These images, names hanging in the eternal catalog appear
miniature, but one most important concession is the New Angel / Angelus Novus to Benjamin (Scholem 210) as a momento of spiritual vocation, a living
allegory, flesh into nonflesh, that sea washed uplifted fella.
These nuances are called
elective affinities by Emmanel Levinas, meaning a force that brings
heterogeneous entities together and unites them in what they like to call a
chemical wedding, but the phrase is redundant. Affinity itself elects, so
strike elective. All this depends on the creation of a reality so small and
obvious that when it is contradicted is bigger than what we had imagined. So it
is with these angels. Benjamin had not gotten approval for his views on the
angel from history however.
Note
Angelus Novus was first displayed at Paul Klee's exhibition in Munich, 1920. The supernatural beings that inhabit his later work began then, fifty terrestrial angels imagined from the metaphysical Weimar and the further later puppets. Call them terrestrial angels as a consolation; we will see they are not celestial, but rather southy, below. Are they imposters? It depends on the point of view. Matters of art are not determined by being human, but slightly more than human, or less. What are the archetypes offered for today? Walter Benjamin purchased Klee’s aquarelle of the Angelus Novus (1920) in 1921 for an equivalent of 14 dollars, some say thirty. Before Benjamin went over the Pyrenees to his death in his escape from Paris and the Gestapo, he put Angelus in one of two valises filled with his manuscripts that he gave to George Batille to hide in the Bibliothèque Nationale. After Benjamin's death Angelus passed to Gershom Scholem who delivered his treatise to its altar, Walter Benjamin and His Angel. After Scholem's mortal reward it went to Jerusalem. Scholem's, Benjamin's, Klee's angel was called the "angel of history" in Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History IX. This melancholy doctoring of angels in ink divined the historical process as an unceasing cycle of despair.
