Angelus suspensus. Essays über die Geduld der Engel (6)

And a storm is blowing from paradise … 

… and it blows open the gates of paradise wide open. It originates from the tree of knowledge. It builds up after the forbidden fruit has been plucked. Whereas previously only a gentle wind moved the leaves and fruits, it now grows stronger and stronger. It sweeps through paradise with a roar, blowing open its gates. 

A nameless angel, his wings folded and turned towards the gates, hears only the protesting squeak of the hinges hitherto unused used – then he is torn through by the storm. Full of horror, he opens his eyes wide and his mouth to scream in protest. Torn away from his place, from his work, he drifts away in the storm with its wings open, his gaze fixed longingly on the place where the gates of paradise had just offered him a home. 

An angel of suffering – unable to act. Unable to move, even to act act, he remains in the state in which the storm holds him captive. He is driven by what did not exist before the storm: an outside of paradise. A world is forming and he is a witness – of time, of history. This is his task now.

His wings remain outstretched, as they were in that fraction of a time that did not yet exist, when the storm caught him and he struggled to withstand it but was swept away. Nor can he close his eyes to what he is forced to see. In helpless paralysis, robbed of his ability to fly, all that remains for him is to fulfill his new task: to see, to bear witness.

At the gates, however, other angels are now watching, cherubim, their wings turned towards paradise, their watchful gaze directed outwards, their naked flaming sword raised to defence. 

In his IX historical-philosophical thesis, Walter Benjamin writes of Klee’s Angelus Novus, who, caught in a storm, drifts through time – his face turned to the past, his back to the future. This storm must be so powerful that it drives an angel so helplessly before it, unable to linger, unable to intervene. The storm of progress, for this is what Benjamin is dealing with, piles up mountains of rubble, evidences of an ongoing catastrophe. 

Klee’s new angel grows scrolls instead of hair. For whom are these messages intended? What will still be decipherable when the storm rages through them, tearing them apart?

What could free the angel from the storm so that he can use his wings to fly again? The time of progress, Chronos, is depicted with wings – but it is he who also clips the wings of others. (e.g. in paintings by Pierre Mignard, Michel Lalos, Van Dyck, Giacinto Gimignani – in Johann Heinrich Schönfeld’s allegory, Eros even hands over his wings to Chronos).

How can one ‘seize the opportunity’ and find the Chairos, the condensed time, in Chronos, in the elapsing time?

And: Does this text by Benjamin tell a nightmare? And who is dreaming it? Do angels dream? Daydreams or nightdreams? And if so, what would the angel of history dream about?

You can’t remember dreams, someone says, you can never carry them inside you, you can only endure them. They remain hors-corps.

But you can draw them. Always, I say and take the pencil. I am not the angel of the story, but if he were me, I would draw him the following: A dot marks the beginning – precise, decisive. The movement of the ocho begins. The tip touches the ground like the pen touches the paper: heavy enough to leave a mark, but light enough to release the line. It is the moment when everything seems to stand still before the movement unfolds. From this point, the dancers turn on the spot around their own axis, while the pivot itself remains fixed. 

We dance the ruins. A spin in which the energy circles as if burning itself into space. As the leading dancer invites the follower with a sideways step to spin, the latter follows the inviting movement – and pivots. His free foot forms an arc, rising in a swing that is half drawn in the air, half projected onto the floor. This arc is not just movement, it is a shape: a half eight, born from the energy of the beginning, before the next step touches the ground.

Now the game starts all over again – the second half of the eight is written. The half eight is more than just forming. Legs write a language with the soles of their feet that is fuelled by rhythm and repetition. The step carries on the power of the point, each line refering to the one to come. Two dancers who can only create something, write something, in joint action. Two dancers who, giving space to each other, form a ‘we’ from you to you and symbolise infinity.

The infinity of the dance movement, their again and again, their once more can lead the dancing couple along an imaginary path through the space or allow themselves to be inscribed in one place until the space opens up again and the path is cleared. Because these two rarely dance alone in the room. Other couples move next to, in front of and behind them. And the space only flows when the ‘we’ of one couple becomes the ‘we’ of all couples. A flow is created in which time no longer plays a role, in which, carried by the music, all couples move together and as a couple and as leaders and followers. The line of movement in the room may be that of a circle, but that of the dance is that of an ellipse. Two double focal points: You and you – we and we.

The angel is not watching the dance. He sees himself, again and again, as a dreaming figure caught in the vortex of the storm. If he saw himself, he might assume he was dancing. But it is only the forces of the storm that toss him around. They glide around him and over him. The wind causes a current on the surface that does not move exactly in the direction of the wind, but is slightly deflected. Is the angel subject to the Coriolis force in the storm of progress? Is his body bound to the rotating body of the earth in the storm – and is his trajectory therefore apparently deflected? Perhaps this is why his view of the piled-up rubble is a dreaming one – always a little off-centre. And perhaps it is precisely this skewed gaze that awakens in him the desire to ‘pause for a moment, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.’ What would happen if the angel awoke – even if only for a moment? Could he then escape the storm, fall out of it into another time? A time that doesn’t line up the disasters chronologically, but where something else might be possible? Dancing, perhaps.

But angels are never awake. The storm that holds the angel is not movement, but state. The dancers appear to him like the shimmering of his own dream: an infinite play of repetitions in which every half eight reflects a part of himself, which is not to be. Today, the angel recognizes something new: in every half eight a second one resonates, invisible and yet tangible. Yin and yang. Together they form two new focal points of the fire ellipse. They remain neither visible nor still, but are alive, pulsating into each other’s movement. 

One swing opens, strives outwards, while the other leads back, holds, preserves. The interlaced ellipses embody the harmony of opposites. The forward step is the yang, the striving, the opening. The backward step is the yin, the holding, the embracing. The two unite like two halves, like two halves that are mutually dependent. Dance and ocho are dialogue. Forwards and backwards, point and momentum, chaos and order – All of this is happening in this movement. A flow is created in which the opposites dissolve and find each other, embrace each other and find a new form.

The angel sees how entanglements fill space and at the same time bind time. Like the ocho, the ephemeral refers to, in which eye and gaze, time and space, everything and nothing are cancelled out, in which the unspoken and the invisible can breathe, a common time-dream for movement and stillness, sound and silence. The angel is only ever a dreamer, but he does not observe the dance. He dances himself and yet does not awaken. He sleeps the storm with his eyes open. His legs are very attentive. And then it happens: A misstep and the rubble field remains.

Marlen Wagner
Tom Sojer