Sliding Down Walls
Jack Graveney
Autumn leaves catch fire in the amber glow of a procession of streetlights. Overnight, a park bench grows a grey coat of cigarette ash and bottle tops. A schoolboy spots the work of prior hands on the pages of his library book. He wonders at the labyrinths his pencil designs on the sheets below the one it touches. Migrant furniture leaves behind proud depressions, parting gifts for rugs and carpets. A white candle sheds wax onto a bar table as it burns away.
Some of these images of Berlin are mine and some Benjamin’s. All are of the same family, all hinting at a shared motif and motion. They suggest the passing of time without making it explicit, in doing so evoking something lost or left behind. As such, they are signs to be read, through which we can recognize the various threads sewn into the fabric of time and watch the present give birth to the past and future.
In the vignette ‘Markthalle’, Benjamin lends this image of the pregnant present a striking physicality. Seeing the heaving mounds of fish, meat, and vegetables piled up before him, and the voluptuous and viscerally fertile market women behind the stalls, he comes to a conclusion only a child could reach. ‘Warf nicht in ihren Schoß ein Marktgott selber die Ware?’, he wonders. Were the wombs of these women not the ‘wahrhaft fruchtbare Boden’ in which the goods for sale grew and from which they emerged? The association of mythology, fertility, and economy here is precarious. Centuries of symbolism allow Benjamin to view these traders as ‘Priesterinnen der käuflichen Ceres’[1], intimately connected with the fruits of their apparent labour. Yet the progress of industry at the outset of the 19th century betrays the childish naïveté of his connection and soon drives the priestesses to extinction. In his afterword to Berliner Kindheit, the philosopher Theodor Adorno picks up nicely on this duality. On the one hand, he notes, pieces like ‘Markthalle’ allow us to recognize ‘das Jüngste als Gleichnis eines Ältesten’. On the other, a shadow hangs menacingly over even the most innocent descriptions.
Time, then, stands in a very particular relation to space for Benjamin. As the open-ended potential of the child’s imagination and the comfort of bourgeois existence meet, the spatial outpaces the temporal. The impression this creates is – to borrow Christopher Hamilton’s image – that of having swallowed a spoonful of syrup, being left drowsy and lethargic, unhurriedly indulgent in symbols and things. Benjamin captures this disintegration of usual temporal constraint with characteristic precision in a discussion of visiting his grandmother, remembering how ‘etwas Sonntag blieb auf dem Grund der Woche’, like chocolate melting on a windowsill.
When rigid chronology does exert itself, it proves especially jarring. In ‘Zu spät gekommen’, a late arrival to school is experienced as an erasure of identity. Upon entering the classroom, young Walter appears not just invisible to his peers but actively unacknowledged, the teacher having ‘withheld’ his name as punishment. At the centre of this piece is the Greek distinction between kairos and chronos, qualitative and quantitative concepts of time: the difference is between something happening ‘at the right time’ and rigidly ‘on time’. A clock face is the most oppressive proof of time’s passing, as the schoolboy discovers when he is jolted out of kairotic reverie.
Illustrationby Annabel Jupp
My first weeks in Berlin have allowed me to share some of Benjamin’s experiences. Circumstances dictated that I spend them not in a bustling flat in Kreuzberg or Friedrichshain but my former teacher’s semi-detached Familienhaus in Rudow on the tail-end of the U7, the Brandenburg border within a few minutes’ walk. Here, comparative isolation and unanticipated cosiness led me into a new relationship with materiality and time. In an essay on surrealism, Benjamin – who also wrote widely on drug-taking, above all cannabis – reminds us of ‘that terrible drug – ourselves – which we take in solitude’. Yet there is a paradox here: indulgence through isolation in the drug of self leads inevitably to the self’s dissolution, to a collapse of the boundaries it usually upholds. Any path to addiction is effaced seemingly before it can be trodden.
Benjamin writes in ‘Die Mummerehlen’ of the childhood compulsion ‘ähnlich zu werden und sich zu verhalten’, enacting in his case not similarities with friends but with objects. Investigating and performing these connections with houses, clothes, items of furniture, leaves him ‘entstellt’, the German prefix ‘ent-’ suggesting a breakdown or deconstruction. My impression in Rudow has been one of deposition, like grains of sand taken by the wind and sprinkled far and wide: left at the complex of light-switches to be deciphered in each room; the weighted door to the boiler with its benign grunts and grumbles; the countless calendars used not as timetabling devices but rotating art installations; the reassuringly neurotic functionality of a nail hammered into the porch wall, on which hung a plastic shoe horn; and the carefully written instructions waiting for me in the most unusual places.
I think the work which best captures this atmosphere is not Berliner Kindheit but a much more recent text: Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond. Here, the calmly convulsive narrative voice of an unnamed woman who has lately moved into an ancient cottage on the Irish coast is funnelled into a series of disarming and authentically bizarre short pieces. As Bennett noted in an interview for the Paris Review, Pond is ‘most essentially…an account of the mind as it exists in solitude’. Within the cottage’s stone walls, this mind entwines with knives and oven knobs, curious cows, sprawling soirées and happenings which never come to pass, scratching rats, and thatched rooves. Details usually confined to the background rise up and determine days, whilst banality’s scarcely perceptible hums become rousing and symphonic. A frankly disorienting range of emotion oscillates between fear and joy and desire and struggles to really arrive anywhere – just as in the same interview we read that ‘when you spend so much time alone you are kind of starting from scratch, on your own terms more or less, every single day, and it’s nullifying and terrifying and occasionally glorious’.
University appointments having been, at least initially, scarce, excursions into surrounding natural areas grounded my days. An early destination was the so-called Dörferblick, a hillock of just over 85m named for the view it offered over the Berlin Wall of three villages in neighbouring Brandenburg: Schönefeld, Waßmannsdorf and Großziethen. The Dörferblick is a Trümmerberg or ‘rubble mountain’, one of many in Berlin and across Germany – artificial hills constructed on the mounds of debris left following the Second World War. Not only is this image evocative again of the pregnant present – what now appears a natural knoll has at its core the wreckage of humanity’s worst conflict – it is also one which would have deeply resonated with Benjamin. Often considered a philosopher of ruin and destruction, his famous ninth thesis on the concept of history is the passage which springs most obviously to mind in this context. Commenting on the artist Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint Angelus Novus, Benjamin describes the ‘Engel der Geschichte’: his wings outstretched, his eyes turned to the past, observing not a chain of distinct events but one single catastrophe, which ‘unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft’. The Trümmerberg grants this metaphor of the past as an insatiable heap of rubble its towering realization; the Berlin one overlooks soon begins to seem decidedly brittle.
Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Rubble and ruin is, in a certain way, just what I am searching for in Berlin. Months of lockdown and family life, whilst far from unenjoyable, induced a certain stagnation. Experiences and events soon became like stones made smooth by a fast-flowing river, the river of reflection. Cognition grew ruminant, tracing already well-established paths of consciousness and drawing familiar lessons. Part of my desire in finally moving was, therefore, to rediscover that lost element of jaggedness, to once more let life pass over me faster than it could be comprehended. Present conditions are not conducive to this goal. But Berlin is surely a more promising location than most. Even Bennett, at one of Pond’s many abrupt digressions, recognizes this: ‘Berlin, you see, doesn’t make things easy for you. If you want to get anywhere with Berlin you have to work at it; you have to slide down its walls a few times’.
Despite their fateful undertones, Benjamin’s reflections are characterized by the utmost smoothness – any jaggedness is the result of careful calculation as opposed to genuine misunderstanding. His interest is not in reoccupying his childhood self and mindset but in reconstructing it, reading meaning back into his memories. The Benjamin we meet in Berliner Kindheit is self-conscious only in retrospect, in that the adult philosopher uses his childhood self as a puppet, the reader seeing both puppet show and puppet master and being able to alternate between them. In ‘Wintermorgen’ this is most explicit: ‘Die Fee, bei der er einen Wunsch frei hat, gibt es für jeden. Allein nur wenige wissen sich des Wunsches zu entsinnen, den sie taten; nur wenige erkennen darum später im eigenen Leben die Erfüllung wieder’. It will be many years before I can ponder whether the wishes of my youth came true. For the moment, it shouldn’t be too difficult to slide down a few walls.
[1] Ceres was the Roman goddess of agriculture, the harvest, and fertility