Angelus suspensus. Essays über die Geduld der Engel (2)
Ink surges forward, relentless – it is time itself. It unfurls like a line across the world, an unceasing sweep of the pen, capturing the future in words and numbers. In its wake, the open and the hidden converge, merging into a memory. From it, and towards it, a moment breathes, glowing with a fragile light in the deepening blue of twilight. Yet what awaits us slips away, disappearing quietly among the trees, where the light barely grazes the earth. Only when it has escaped our grasp do we finally see, turned away in the figure of an angel, deep within the shadows of the forest: an ethereal woman, her back turned towards us, her head gently inclined over her left shoulder, her ear tuned to our presence. The empty face does not see us. It listens, straining to catch what unfolds in the vastness behind us. Perhaps it is not the angelic woman herself, but the act of listening that surrounds her and us – an endless, all-encompassing listening that draws us into the stillness of the forest.
Invisible threads stretch through the dense thicket. A wing, strange and flat, moved in the waves by something unapproachable, laid across black, mirror-like waters. A peculiar ring of time embedded in her tree trunk, perhaps a wing, perhaps an apostrophe – or both, a symbol guiding the shift in words, like the rustling of leaves follows the wind. What does the apostrophe hold back from revealing itself? Whose absence does it signal? The old origin, long lost within the forest, or the new one, poised on the brink, waiting to leap into the unknown…
Like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, the apostrophe twists and turns through the act of writing, its back to the future. It compels us to confront the touch of the unseen and the undone, illuminating in their absence a clearing, a world beyond the forest where breath no longer reaches us. The apostrophe becomes her opening, her tear, her cut, her depth, her fold, her abyss – and also her seam, her edge, her hem, wrapping its bearer in a silent shroud of language. The angelic woman unfolds within it, like an infinite braid. What lies beyond, at the edge of the fields or further still? There, at the forest’s edge, along the world’s boundary, the excess surges, glowing faintly above moss-covered ground. Does she, the one marked by the apostrophe, truly see what she gazes upon? Is she about to turn her face towards us, or away from us? In the undergrowth, the truth remains her secret.
And is it our secret that we have become a mystery, a drama, a spectacle for the angels (1 Corinthians 4:9)? Wind-loved – interwoven – laid bare, we remain suspended in uncertainty, gazing into the eschatological reserve of the text, its patience bearing the weight of the unspeakable. The apostrophe marks us within the script, tracing an outline and beginning the delicate cut into the unsayable.
Thomas Sojer
Robert Krokowski