The Angel of History
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 towards 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 in 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 grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
Walter Benjamin arrives at the Mexican border from Port Bou, it is not the border between France and Spain in 1940 and he is not turned away. Long ago forced to abandon his library, he has stopped quoting. “Now,” he reflected with a bemused smile beneath his wire rims, “after my death, my thoughts have become my own.” He keeps a diary as he did in Moscow. On Cinco de Mayo he boards the Mexico City subway during rush hour, flotsam in the crush of humanity. A blind couple board the car, the man plays the harmonica, making no attempt at melody, while the woman, close behind with her hand on his shoulder, calls out for donations. She is wearing mirrored sunglasses with the word “enjoy” written across each lens.
Benjamin wanders the endless streets, he passes fruit sellers on the sidewalks, enormous piles of papaya carefully arranged, several of the fruits are cut open in the configuration of blossoming flowers, the vendors call out their prices as if reciting public intimacies. A woman offers him a sample from the tip of an ancient blade, he is happy for the first time in years. After hours of wondering, in evening half-light in front of the Presidential Palace, a boy dances alone in slow motion, he wears a white box on his head on which are inscribed the words, in English, “empire builder.”
Benjamin finds himself moving from cathedral to synagogue, from palace to barrio, and with his steps he describes a circle, enveloping the city with a girdle of prayers and questions. He jots in his notebook, “Is Christianity anything more than the Inquisition?” and “Every gesture of faith is a miracle to me.” As if his ritualistic perambulations had unlocked a door, fragments of his previous life appear like fireflies sparking up his memory. He remembers his friend Gershom Sholem, the brightest light of all.
On the long bus ride from Mexico City to Oaxaca, Benjamin writes, “passing a landscape now, a post-industrial impressionism. Motley curtains of brownish haze give way to an overextended rural green. Each person passed involved in some activity, quotidian dialogue, the exchange of breath and money, multitudes of purpose, tended fields, a mechanic’s garage, young women selling tortillas by the roadside. The space between the farmer with mule and the village church whose spires gleam dimly one mile beyond. That space, that separation of things observed, the loneliness of not being them.”
Walter Benjamin, traveling the same routes of the Conquistadors, arrives in Todos Santos, Guatemala, all saints high in the mountains of Huehuetenango. He was stopped several times at military roadblocks. With no papers to account for his life, he is an undocumented person. He sings a song to himself, simply titled “papers,” “Where is my home? I have no home. What is my name? I have no name.” The deep unease, the overwhelming claustrophobia of his years in Switzerland, Germany and France returns. A decades-old image of the Fascist border guard shouting at him in Spanish, “These are not the proper papers, there is no crossing for Jews.” He remembers cringing, tiredly fingering the packet of death in his trouser picket as hope passed over his head like a star falling from the sky.
In Todos Santos he takes up residence in a pension named San Juan Bautista where he finds an altar with a book opened to the image of Martin Luther King, a fellow martyr of historical conscience. The outhouse behind the pension is a plank with a hole, suspended over the village stream. The pages of old paperback books are used for toilet paper; today’s volume is Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo. Benjamin meets Don Pasqual, the village elder who takes him to a darkened shack. Pinholes in the corrugated tin roof create constellations on light on the dirt floor. As Don Pasqual moves, his body wrapped in colorful cloth, he disturbs the galaxies, scattering and reorganizing the astrological calendar.
After a prayer ritual with three candles with which Don Pasqual cleanses Benjamin’s past and baptizes his new life, he asks if he would like to examine the contents of the two yellow wooden boxes topped by crude crosses, that the Todos Santeros have worshiped for centuries. Inside are the sacred writings of his people. Benjamin caresses the crumbling brown leather documents written in archaic Spanish and the sepia panoramic photographs of the local valley. Don Pasqual does not read Spanish but does not seem the least concerned when Benjamin explains that the writings are in fact land titles from a colonial governor. While Don Pasqual nods enigmatically, Benjamin holds the texts and images in his delicate hands that begin to shake. Bringing his trembling appendage to his mouth, he nibbles his familiar thumb. Later he ponders the difficulties in the portrayal of others as primitive mystics existing outside of time. He writes and smiles as if he were scribbling a joke “authenticity is a touchy issue”.
In San Mateo Ixtatan, roughly translating the name to “Saint Matthew in the Land of Salt”, Benjamin writes, “the name combines the tongue of Cortez with the universe of the Maya.” The facade of local church is painted yellow with exuberantly splashed magenta obscuring the identities of the saints crouching in their portals. The structure is thick and brooding, it leans, almost lurching, toward the remains of a Mayan pyramid to the north. The pyramid overlooks yet another valley of sacrifice where the blood of martyrs, be they Mayan or Ladino, catholic or communist, has been shed in centuries of transfiguration.
Inside the church – a dialectic of crosses. The altar at the front proffers the usual Christian symbol of sacrifice, while the back of the church holds the long, green wooden cross of the Maya that connect the underworld with the heavens. “I do not own this church,” the Maryknoll parish priest says to Benjamin. “I share it, by their blessing.” Upon Benjamin’s entrance to the church, he finds women dressed in the complex language of the village’s huipiles, their embroidered blouses. They gather, kneeling, around the Mayan cross, chanting and gossiping, burning grasses to the ancients and ignoring the savior of the Conquistadors. He scribbles, “transformation is constant in this society, despite attempts by colonial/military mentality to crush the subversive culture of the Maya, their history is never completely assimilated or neutralized.”
While Benjamin sleeps, dreaming of a very different life with Dora in Switzerland, an army colonel is ambushed and assassinated by the guerillas just outside of town. Benjamin steps into the early morning sun and a shimmering sea of silver as the fog lifts from the valley. A military unit occupies the town seeking revenge for the assassination. Soldiers crawl up and then outline the pyramid, paint a giant white circle on the flattened top to be used as a landing pad.
The priest, a long way from his birthplace in New Hampshire, watches from the bell tower as U.S. manufactured helicopters land on the ancient structure. Benjamin’s severe myopia prevents him from keeping stationary eyes on the camouflaged young men. Instead his gaze sweeps the Mayan sky as nervous civil patrolmen scurry out of their houses carrying aging M-1 rifles with “Property, Army of Israel” stamped in Hebrew. The helicopters begin to strafe the hills with napalm, neo-Monroe doctrine meets Zionism meets Conquistador racism. History telescoping, Benjamin is dizzy with internal vertigo as he stumbles over the broken road, witnessing the continuous clash of centuries in a single moment.
On the long road back to he knows not where, from San Mateo Ixtatan through Todos Santos, Benjamin stops at a rocky outcropping. Next to a thatched-roof hut is a shrine to San Antonio, consisting of a white geological formation in a larger grotto of blackened stone. Representing the saint’s arms are two short lengths of wood are fastened to the stone. Cloudy remains of candles are caught in frozen drips at the base of the saint. At 12,000 feet, the landscape is cool, foggy, wet and gray. A small herd of sheep pulls at the grass at the foot of the shrine. They look up to San Antonio and Walter Benjamin with sacrificial eyes.
He asks the woman who lives there with her sister and children, (one husband had been killed as a suspected subversive, the other works in San Diego, California, picking flowers), how long had San Antonio’s miraculous apparition been occupying the grotto? “Since the beginning of time,” she replies. Moving through the last of Guatemala’s mountain rain forests, Benjamin is shocked by the deforestation. The army has cleared one hundred meters on either side of the road, ostensibly to prevent guerrilla ambush. Guatemala’s lumber industry is controlled and owned by members of the military’s upper echelons. Soldiers trudge through the dwindling community with buzz saws, several days later army trucks remove the fallen. In inaccessible areas the trees lie rotting, miles of crisscrossing trunks decaying, scattered about as if thrown there by a delirious god despairing over the I-Ching.
Benjamin decides to remain here among these dead giants, in this gray/white horizontal forest. He mumbles to himself, “this is not a whim that leads nowhere.” Standing on a burning trunk of pine he shouts with a force that is many decibels louder than any other utterance of his life: “It is only for the hopeless ones that we have been given hope.” He pulls out sheets of French paper that he stuffed in his back pocket in 1939, and begins to count the fallen, giving each martyred tree a name. Benjamin makes a list, a precise count that acknowledges death, and by wandering and naming he gives life, life to memory, life to what has been abused and forgotten, and life to himself, faraway and many years from Port Bou.
An earlier version of this essay appeared in Shift #8.
Images by Author
