Midrash
At a certain moment, Walter Benjamin’s
Angel of History, who would like to turn
and warn us, but is blown inexorably
backward by a wind from Paradise
caught in his wings, stops.
The wind has stopped. But for a moment
he doesn’t realize it. The mound
of ruins he faces (history) is already as high
as those garbage middens in Lima
or Lagos that people live on;
and some slippage at the top,
an old Sony perhaps, an empty
drum, makes him think
the wind is still blowing. Then he tries
to turn, to warn us. But his wings
are caught in something spiky and
gluey. He’s completely immobilized
as the pile before him slumps and settles.
But immobility for an angel
isn’t the same as for us. He moves among us,
impeccably invisible in any
context, a turban, a baseball cap,
pinstripes; and what he discovers, what he
invests time in is
pity. At a Wim Wenders retrospective
he watches *Wings of Desire*; Cassiel’s credo,
"assemble, testify, preserve," gives him
the key. The woman living
on a bench at a bus stop, the photo
of a missing girl behind her (is it
she? The Angel of History can’t quite grasp
time); the other posters
of dogs and cats, the anguish pulsing
from sub-prime-mortgaged houses cause
it to grow in him (pity, that is,
or time). Till he thinks
he may die of it. Yet is glad
to recreate in even this ersatz form
the sense of being blown back, unable to warn.
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