Readings out of Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings, this time it was Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934, but the selecting and making of quotations appeared wrong to me. A feeling of transgression, I wanted to quote it all, as if the only honest response I could think of as the reader was to transcribe the whole volume from start to end, or beginning from wherever I had begun dipping into, and then over and over again. This honest response, my honesty or the lack of it today, being the question of morality; of the ethical position of writer and reader.

In short, (how) work finds itself a voice. The phrase is found in a piece in Vol 2, Part 2, called Diary from August 7, 1931, to the Day of My Death. Unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime, “This diary does not promise to become very long,” Benjamin begins and it is true that it is brief, amounting to only about two thousand words in all. But the phrase about work and the brevity of his pieces seems to offer a kind of salvation.

Or put another way, which Benjamin did using a similar phrase within a later, and this time even shorter, piece called The Newspaper, this time published in Der öffentliche Dienst (Zurich), March 1934, and totalling less then five hundred words. “For since writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinction between author and public that the press has maintained (although it is tending to loosen it through routine) is disappearing in a socially desirable way. The reader is at all times ready to become a writer – that is, a describer or even a prescriber. As an expert – not perhaps in a discipline but in a post that he holds – he gains access to authorship. Work itself has its turn to speak.”

As it happened, being both in and out of work last weekend, I was staying in a large house along the southwest coast of Wales. Located perhaps not so far from where WG Sebald had described the lonely childhood of his middle-european hero in his last novel Austerlitz, the house had been extensively rebuilt in the nineteenth century around a cavernous hall and great wooden staircase, so that on first entering by the front door the wide stairway in the centre of the hall immediately presented itself, leading upwards to a half landing and then dividing against the distant seeming wall to both left and right, a far wall upon which an enormous oil painting happened to hang like a cinema screen covering the whole surface and capturing a moment from antiquity, it was in fact the entry of Alexander into Athens upon a chariot with a near naked Diogenes shown lying outside his barrel in the foreground, and the divided stairs then turned again rising without visible means of support in parallel flights back on themselves towards what is hidden to the onlooker apart from their wooden embossed and geometrically patterned undersides, rising to an obscured landing, and the hall itself was also very dark adding to the sense of foreboding, the only natural light penetrating from above the staircase and giving the impression that further flights of stairs might continue to rise higher and higher towards the sky, but all was hidden from view.

Where is this staircase leading to? I asked myself more than once during the weekend, having found myself in a state of being equally in and out of place. Because the staircase was clearly not going nowhere, for instance, I could grasp the notion that the staircase was located in a house which was a home, and I could rely on there being bedrooms on the first and perhaps higher floors. But although I could also fix upon a date for its construction in the 1870’s, the question remained, neither wholly in or out of mind, since the purpose of the staircase seemed to transcend domesticity, and my thinking split like the divided staircase itself towards nightmare possibilities of a fantastic architecture, and other imaginative purposes which also impressed themselves on me in cinematic fashion like the story from antiquity being shown in the great picture on the far wall, but again whether my attention was meant more for Alexander or Diogenes I was unable to tell, and split in many other ways to do with its seeming continental minded design and past, and so on without end.

But whether in or out of history, I seemed entirely unable to post the staircase along the river of time. “Run-of-the-mill history answers more questions than a wise man will”, Benjamin writes elsewhere in the diary entry for August 7^th (1931), and then continues. “My attempt to explain a theory of history in which the concept of development is entirely supplanted by the concept of origins.  Understood in this way, history cannot be sought in the riverbed of a process of development.  Instead, as I have remarked elsewhere, the image of a riverbed is replaced by that of a whirlpool.  In such a whirlpool earlier and later events – the prehistory and post history of the event, or, better, of a status, swirled around it. The actual objects of such a view of history are not specific events but specific unchanging statuses of the conceptual or sensual kind – for example, the Russian agrarian system, the city of Barcelona, population shifts in the Mark of Brandenburg, barrel vaulting, and so on.” Or the status (state, condition or situation) of this staircase I thought as I paused in my reading. “ If this approach is determined by its firm rejection of the possibility of an evolutionary or universalist dimension in history, it is determined internally by a productive polarity.  The twin poles of such a view of the historical and political – or, to point up the distinction even more sharply, the historical and the event. These two factors occupy two completely different planes. We can never say, for example, that we experience history; nor can we maintain that a historical account brings the events so close to us that it has the same impact as a historical event (such an account would be worthless), or that we have experienced events that are destined to become history (since such a view is journalistic).”

The image of a whirlpool, or a turning staircase at whose bottom we have arrived (in media res inadvertently revisiting) upon entering the darkly lit hall, and ascend to the first landing mid-floor, where it divides in two along the productive polarity of parallel flights, because – Yes! – the world is otherwise bewildering.

Have I slept? I am just falling asleep.
(- Karl Kraus, Words in Verse IV)