Progress

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 toward 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

- Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the Philosophy of History

among the ruins

‘Anyone who cannot cope with life whilst he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others, after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor’

- Franz Kafka, Diaries, entry of October 19^th, 1921

We are overloaded with critiques of the horrors of capitalism: books, in-depth investigative journalism and TV documentaries expose the companies that are ruthlessly polluting our environment, the corrupt bankers who continue to receive fat bonuses while their banks are rescued by public money, the sweatshops in which children work as slaves, etc. However, there is a catch: what isn’t questioned in these critiques is the democratic-liberal framing of the fight against these excesses. The (explicit or implied) goal is to democratise capitalism to the economy by means of media pressure, parliamentary enquires, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on. But the institutional set-up of the (bourgeois) democratic state is never questioned. This remains sacrosanct to even the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’.

From the article 'Gentlemen of the Left' by Slavoj Zizek, LRB volume 33 number 2

For a Five Year Old, by Fleur Adcock

A Snail is climbing up the window-sill
Into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
That it would be unkind to leave it there:
It might crawl onto the floor; we must take care
That no one squashes it. You understand,
And carry it outside, with careful hand,
To eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of truth prevails:
Your gentleness is moulded still by words
From me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds
From me, who drowned kittens, who betrayed
Your closest reletives, and who purveyed
The harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
And we are kind to snails.

Against Coupling by Fleur Adcock

I write in praise of the solitary act:

of not feeling a trespassing tongue

forced into ones mouth, ones breath

smothered, nipples crushed against the

ribcage, and that metallic tingling

In the chin set off by by a certain odd nerve:

unpleasure. Just to avoid those eyes would help –

such eyes as a young girl draws life from

listening to the vegetal

rustle within her, as his gaze

stirs polypal fronds in the obscure

sea-bed of her body, and her own eyes blur,

There is much to be said for abandoning

this no longer novel exercise –

for not ‘participating’ in

a total ‘experience’ – when

one feels like the lady in Leeds who

had seen The Sound of Music eighty six times

or more, perhaps, like the school drama mistress

producing A Midsummer Nights Dream

for the seventh year running, with

yet another class from 5B.

Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, but

the hole in the wall can be troublesome.

I advise you, then, to embrace it without

encumbrance. No need to set the scene,

dress up (or undress), make speeches.

Five minutes of solitude are

Enough – in the bath, or to fill

that gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.