Walter Benjamin used the words 'wreckage of history' to describe an understanding he saw in a painting by Paul Klee titled Angelus Novus (New Angel).
Benjamin called the painting Angel of History and it seemed to him that Klee's angel was looking back at a history that wasn't a chain of progressive events but a single catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage, an accumulation of ruin, broken promises, fragments of unrealized potential and silenced voices. The nervous expression on the angel's face suggested the storm of progress was nonetheless propelling the angel forward, nothing anyone could do about it.
It was 1940, the world was at war, pretty natural that a Jew looking to escape the concentration camps should have a fairly unhappy view of the world. Benjamin's understanding of Self wasn't framed around Jewishness, it was framed around a Self that was a struggling German Intellectual, his contribution to literary criticism, politics, philosophy and sociology slowly becoming established.
In his Thesis on the Philosophy of History, as though to find comfort somewhere Benjamin looked at the New Angel and he introduced his idea of the past as a "Weak Messianic Force." The past was there, it was grumbling, sometimes writhing in agony, re-written perhaps, but not forgotten.
In discussions with my alter egos, as we share opinions about the future, I have found myself questioning and in opposition to the inglorious, thick witted nature of the people dominating the process. The Cat's Whiskers, they are not. And indeed, you can always see Eden until God takes it away.
