VANITY MIRROR
Love begins with the contemplation of beauty, yet contemplation is a situation produced by capitalist production. Love itself is therefore allegoricaclass="underline" Asja could be anybody, she is the shape of the particular emptiness Walter brought with him to this Italian island, and it is the exactness of fit that bewitches him, the stencil of an unfulfilled desire waiting only to attach itself to a name. Asja: again and again he inscribes it, admiring the concordance between sound and image. I love you, he writes secretly to himself. I want to be with you, I want to leave my wife and child and live only with you. I want to be living the past that we will jointly remember, reading these words that will have become historical fact.
Capitalism is a mass narcosis whose ur-myth is the false promise: you can be happy. But love is this same dream, an internalised mythology, and Asja laughs at him: I am not a muse of the bourgeoisie, I am a proletarian and a free woman. I am not an unpaid prostitute who will be told whom I may or may not sleep with; I satisfy my physical needs and desires as I see fit. Free your own mind and heart, Walter, if your marriage is unhappy then get out of it.
— But what about our son?
He needs real love, not the illusion of an outmoded institution.
— How am I to find happiness?
Only through revolutionary action.
It is the Copernican turn of his heart; he came here to finish his thesis on Baroque drama but already he is thinking of another project: a book of fragments, epigrammatic or even surreal in character, apparent irrelevancies serving to create new, unintended meaning. And though he will go to Moscow, the centre of his thought will be Paris, the covered arcades where Baudelaire realised he was strolling in Hell.
Asja, I love you, he writes. I want to be able to look at your face every day; see how, like a mountain beside a lake, it changes with every passing cloud, every fluctuation of pressure and temperature. I want to see your breasts, kiss your belly and that catacomb, place of skulls, your lap where a new dream breaks all fetters and submerges us. I want to be human with you, mortal, slowly ruined by time until we are both dust together. I have never known this certainty of disaster.
— Walter, you are delightful and I so much enjoy being with you. I can think of no more stimulating companion, with your astute mental faculties, your understanding of philosophy. But you’re clumsy, and things will fall.
CONSPIRACY
1. By all means discuss the book you are writing, but do not disclose its essence, any more than you would tell a child how a magic trick is done.
2. Make note of everything. For example, the conversation with the unusual Frenchman.
3. Adhere to the timetable of an honest worker. Writing is like engineering, done with the hands.
4. Think always of the one who is the cause of all this. Keep her image in mind, be faithful to it. Love every sentence as you love her. That is to say, without hope or expectation.
5. Difference between document and artwork: the former serves to educate the public, the latter discovers truth.
6. In every philosophical project there is an esoteric quality. Expect understanding no more than you crave applause.
7. Keep a favourite pen, a well-ordered desk, and dedicate yourself to making ideas surrender themselves to you — for they alone will yield to your advances.
PLEASE USE ASHTRAYS
Walter Benjamin is sitting on the terrace of a café overlooking the bay. He knows several Germans staying on the island, and has been busying himself with excursions, social visits, letter writing, conversation. But today he is alone, with only his notebook and his thoughts. The thesis on Trauerspiel is finished; next will be his book of fragments, it will be called One-Way Street, and he will dedicate it to Asja.
A man comes and sits at another table, a foreigner like Benjamin, of similar age. They greet one another; the man responds in French, and after exchanging a few pleasant words they agree to sit together. Like Benjamin, the Frenchman has been on Capri for some time, has covered much of the same ground, both physically and socially, though neither claims any recollection of the other. They share a bottle of wine and a dish of olives; alcohol creates an air of friendship that might not otherwise have manifested itself so quickly.
Benjamin explains why he came here; he hopes to get a permanent position at Frankfurt University if his thesis is accepted.
“Is it a good thesis?”
“As good as I could make it, though perhaps that will be the problem, since success in circumscribed fields is dependent on adherence to existing categories of thought rather than the creation of new ones.”
“You speak like a philosopher of art.”
“And you, if I may say so, have the air of a poet.”
The stranger laughs. “You mean an eccentric? I adopt certain local habits, my razor is not too sharp, I have no woman telling me how I should look.”
“Did desire bring you here?”
“Only for knowledge, I study mathematics. Here is a problem for you, Epimenides the Cretan says that all Cretans are liars: do you believe him?”
“I know the paradox very well, there is something demonic in its circularity.”
“It’s a devil of a riddle, that’s for sure. What about the barber who shaves every man who doesn’t shave himself? Or the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves?”
“Children’s puzzles have always appealed to me, especially visual ones.”
“To be consistent is to exist, that is the law of mathematics, a single violation should be enough to make the entire edifice vanish into non-being. Yet we live in an age of paradox, science has demonstrated it. Time can be slowed or quickened, space is curved, light is neither wave nor particle, or perhaps is both. There are our new categories of thought.”
SHAKE BEFORE OPENING
The nineteenth century is when the crowd, the mass, becomes generally recognised as an object of history; it is in opposition to the crowd that the modern concept of the individual arises. Poe’s story, ‘The Man Of The Crowd’, depicts the view through a coffee-house window: real life is what happens on the street, the interior is a place of illusion. The crowd is a reservoir of energy, a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness, creating collision, surprise, chance. Gambling becomes a widespread and socially acceptable bourgeois pastime. The victors of revolution are the speculators. Marx says of Darwin’s theory that it serves as a scientific basis for the class struggle, a death-blow to teleology, a rational-empirical explanation of historical progress; though without the inclusion of proletarian consciousness it is simply a description of capitalism itself. Baudelaire translates Poe’s story, appreciating the revulsion inherent in it. Like Rousseau he reverts to solitary wandering, which is to say savagery. Urban industrialised life is dependent on fear of being alone, yet manufactures isolation. Love is a commodity whose inflated price we must recognise. Like any stock, its value exists only by virtue of shared belief.
GRADUS AD PARNASSUM