I circle around God, around the age-old tower;
I’ve been circling for millenia
and still I don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm,
or a sovereign song? — Rainer Maria Rilke
Ben had been walking for nearly a day and a half once the rest of his party had caught up to him. The soles of his feet felt raw and pulsated with a force that appeared to grow greater in intensity with each subsequent placement upon the ground. A grotesque, fleshy harmony asserted itself within those lower extremities of his begging for a reprieve from his ghoulish procession. All the while the wind blew, the grass shined, and the sun sparkled—it was a beautiful day.
He was meant to start off on the trek earlier than the others as he was much older than the rest; Ben was forty-eight years old. A portly gentleman of a stout and relaxed demeanor, Ben never once gave the impression of being a man of robust health. In fact, the very origin of his physiognomy betokened a disposition to corpulence as he was born with inflamed hands: a cruel joke played on a man destined for work that so often required delicate digits. These were the same hands that won him reprieve from fighting in the Great War as a young man—did they really look so different now? As the years passed more lines accrued, each a sign of forward movement, of breath, of disintegration. The throbbing in his feet traveled diligently to his heart. Each pump squeezed out as if he were willing it in his conscious mind. A stillness between every beat concealed a frightening anticipation of more pain. A man of his health would do little better riding in a carriage than walking the path he chose. Life is made of impossible choices.
His companions included the bubbly Lisa, and the beautiful Henny carrying her boyish Joseph in tow. Lisa was to be their guide through the Pyrenees, it was a job thrust upon her by her husband despite neither knowing the area that well. Ben desperately needed to leave France as Hitler would soon be shaking hands with Pétain (it was quite well known by 1940 that Adolf was no friend to Jews like Ben). The countryside was marvelous, the sky looked as if it were an intricate mosaic assembled of only the finest Persian lapis lazuli. The air did not just fill one’s lungs, but nourished them as if they were surrounded by a transparent cream.
The lushness of the mountains was strangely alien to Ben. He had grown up in Berlin. When one peered down an alley in West Berlin it invoked a feeling of an ever expanding but distinctly enclosed space, like a tunnel that one was born inside of and could not leave. Ben had traveled the world: he had been to Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Greece, England, and many more places. Despite all of his travels Ben never left Berlin. As a bird’s brain forces a migration south, so too did Ben’s organ command thoughts of that comforting German city. Seeing Henny cradle her baby boy brought back hazy memories of being held by his own mother through the city’s streets. The cobblestone damp with late afternoon rain, the ladies plastered to the arms of their gentlemen, the moonlight banking of the limitless glass windows that rose up to the heavens. This Berlin, Ben’s Berlin, was a new metropolis for the twentieth century—what was achieved rivaled the mythological labyrinths dreamt up by the poets of antiquity. Every day a new building constructed, every day a new road cleared. Like a contemporary Ship of Theseus new bricks were laid over the city, and yet the city retained its character. Berlin was home and Ben know he would never see home again.
Berlin was a place whose full expression could only be found in dreams, far beneath the conscious mind. Ben took full stock of the power of dreams, the arcane magic that ferments between the folds of the brain. The dream-work, as Freud called it, was known to be midwife to many a ghost and Ben could vividly recall one such encounter with the phantasmagoric in his life. He was a young man, dense as a stone with preconceived notions of the world, its people, and its inner clockwork. He had spent his day studying like he had spent many days before and he would be spending many days in the future. Not long after skull made acquaintance with pillow did he find himself in another ped most peculiar. He realized he was between two figures: the one on his left was his beloved aunt Friederike, the one on his right nothing more than a shapeless blob. The covers felt as if they were made of steel and crushed his abdomen with excruciating force. The windows were wide open and revealed the room to be none other than his aunt’s guestroom! What joy he would have visiting! How lovely it was to be in company with Friedi! He turned to converse but found himself unable to transport his gaze away from the streaming light. Although the apartment was on the fifth floor there seemed to be people walking on solid ground looking in through the window, each expressionless and clearly uninterested in the interior. Every new face blended into the prior until all that could be seen was a wadded morass of flesh hovering beside the glass. Almost at once the gore settled and lines were drawn into its squishy skin. A pair of eyes formed, then a nose, and, finally, a mouth. The contours reminded Ben of someone familiar and his heart was filled with a radiant, calming love. He awoke at once and exasperatingly whipped his head from side to side to confirm he was still in his childhood bedroom—he was. Three days later Ben’s mother informed him that her sister, Friederike, had committed suicide. This taught Ben that death was not an event experienced by the victim but one transmitted to all the living capable of receiving its signals.
Each step began to feel like its own battle, the war to reach Spain inevitably pyrrhic. The staunch phalanx of the tendons in his knees giving way to the spry hoplites of neurons chucking javelins of pain full force throughout his body. Ben remembered when walking was easy—all one had to do was think and the body moved. Noew the machinery was populated by members of the proletariat champing at the bit to call a general strike. At any moment he could seize up, but foot found position in front of foot and carried on. The terror came not in the form of losing control, but not knowing when it would happen.
Physical pain was a frequent mistress throughout Ben’s life. As a boy he received beatings on the schoolyard peppered with pejoratives aimed at what set him apart from them: his bookishness, his sniveling sensitivity, and his bloated hands. As a young man he was sickly. Illness manifested itself in colds, fevers, mumps, rashes, inflammations, irritations, and hemorrhages. Some days it felt like his blood might turn to stone, while other days it felt like Moses himself split his rocky arteries, unleashing an impossibly powerful torrent that would rush through his flesh. It was no wonder he was drawn to the written word; a refugee of the material world could take comfort in the ever shifting rooms of speculative thought. Space was not a position amidst an infinitely complex coordinate system; it was a lens to focus and intensify ideas of beauty and art.
There was always someone, or something, conspiring against the misty realms of the sublime. Always people jealous of the joy and splendor bestowed upon those careful enough to search the depths of life’s mysteries. In antiquity this fear took the form of Meletus as he cast judgment upon Socrates and forced the philosopher to suffer hemlock. During the Renaissance it took the form of the Catholic church, whose inquisitors shamed the mighty intellect of Galileo. Modernity’s specter wraps its fangs around art, beauty and life itself while marching under banners to the beat of fascism. The fascists drain the verve and majesty of everyday life by dressing it up in a cruel spectacle of violence and carnage. Few political movements obsessed with art have found themselves so unable to produce anything of note as the fascists. Grasping for the soul of humanity the fascists blindly grope around by displaying facsimiles of great works constructed thousands of years ago cut off from their historical meaning. The fascist project conducts pain on a plane that crosses over from the purely physical—it treds on the level of ideas.
Fascism had stripped Ben of his home. Berlin was transmogrified into a vessel for the fatherland, its supposed timeless truth asserting that all other lands are grossly inferior. Ben believed no truth could be made an orphan of time—truth develops from the march of history: it required real, physical people interacting with each other in a concrete, material universe. To claim Berlin had always been a bastion of Teutonic divinity would be to remove the intricately woven fabric of temporal reality constitutive of the city’s beauty. It was beautiful because it changed and grew stronger with every breath.
Ben’s own breaths began to grow fainter as the party came closer to reaching their destination he felt as if he were sucking air from a narrow straw. His cells were shrieking for respite. Thoughts of home tightened his joints; his organic coils unwinded. Ben knew each step forward was a step closer to salvation. A direct result of Ben’s Jewish was his disposition to messianic thinking. Ben believed that history could only be thought of as a great orchestra conducted by the deft hands of theology. Its grand events were conditioned by a profound movement of a collective spirit. This spirit was one that played a trick on the observer by imparting an unshakeable faith in teleology (events are felt as contingent, their outcomes necessary). All has happened as it only could have; all a man is defined by what he has done (which was now irreversible). It was no mistake that the medieval chronicler recorded history with an eye towards fate—his hand guided by the muse of faith in the meaning of things both physical and social. Meaning necessarily derived by a temporal arc bending in directions revealed to the patient observer. History confronts the historian ready made; it confronts the theologian as yet to come.
The ancient Jews believed in an eventual salvation. “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” History would unfold in anticipation of the very moment where all of what had happened become anointed in a meaning of unparalleled divinity. The crassest moments sculpted retroactively though time as preparation for the eschatological crescendo needed to punctuate all experience. It was to be felt physically: all “that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt.” The scales would be balanced, the correct notches tallied. Ben’s salvation laid within the front pocket sewn to his right pant leg. The lambswool enclosure contained a small canister which held seventy grams of morphine split between fourteen five gram pills. He was told half as much was needed to kill a horse, but he felt chances should not be taken with one’s own fiery chariot to God. He knew what was to await him should he be captured by the Nazis as his brother had been sent to Mauthausen and communication had become scant.
Once the team of travelers crossed the border into France they were confronted by two Spanish soldiers. The soldiers claimed that the group’s traveling papers were no longer valid as word had come from on high that all French refugees were to be sent back to Paris. Ben’s head was aching so hard that he could barely comprehend the pigeon French wielded by the guards. His chest sunk low into a vast abyss. He was falling inside himself at a speed which was at odds with the outside world’s stillness. The brilliant sunlight of the Pyrenees dimmed and he could see Berlin, but Berlin did not breathe—it wheezed.
Ben awoke in a bed with a tightness in his chest not felt since his first heart attack four years prior. He had been walking up the stairs of a friend’s house in Switzerland after a stimulating game of chess. Once he reached the top of the staircase he felt himself being wrenched from his skin and hoisted into the air. It was as if his gray matter were being strained through cheese cloth, a viscous stew bubbling up neurons like flotsam. He felt honored to join the ranks of Enoch and Elijah—proud men called up to rest before their final works could begin.
He looked around the simple cottage lodgings he had been supplied with to recover. His sheets were stained with large, irregular waves of sweat; the windowsill was covered in dust; light bloomed lazily through the glass. He heard steps from beyond the heavy oak door that tortured the antediluvian wood while forcing out noises that sounded more like wails than creaks. Ben’s chest tightened once more as he reached for his pocket as fast as he could. As soon as the cap was severed from the medicine bottle he had a mouthful of dry morphine. The pills were pulverized with aplomb and quickly formed a glue-like paste that tasted of paper and held tightly to the slimy tube connected to his stomach. The steps came closer and Ben tossed the brownish glass underneath the sweat-soaked bed.
A frail bespectacled old man entered the room. He asked Ben how he was feeling, if he ever had anything like this happen before to him, if the pain was getting worse or better. Ben held out his hands and said, “meinen Händen geht es einfach gut”. The old man smiled and shuffled out of the room. Ben rested his head so that the ceiling comprised his entire cone of vision. In doing so, he began to see every nook and crack of the white surface above him. The bumps and pores of the planar coordinates grew so large it was as if he had been lifted up by nine feet of pneumatic pistons. The tiny ripples of pain expanded to mountains, the mountains to planets, the planets to galaxies. Soon he was through the roof and in the sky. It was a sky so clear that he thought he must be back in Berlin. And in fact he was. Ben was in Berlin.
The next time the old man would enter the room he would see that Ben had died. The old man would write in his littler ledger that the deceased had passed away as a result of a brain hemorrhage. He would find and dispose of the bottle beneath the bed frame. Lisa and Henny would be told that their papers were in fact valid and that the whole mess had been a miscommunication. Ben would be buried in a catholic cemetery using the francs found on his person—his body would be moved to a common cemetery after the following four months when the rental plot expired. Two years later his brother would be murdered in a gas chamber. Ben would be remembered as an intense thinker with a sensitive soul.
In the Talmud it is said that every child is accompanied in the womb by an angel. The angel teaches the fetus all there is to know: the laws of the Torah, the mysteries of the universe, and the meaning of life. Upon completion of their divine task the angel lightly taps the mouth of their young scholar, silencing them and forming an impression on the upper lip. As the child grows they learn only what they already once knew. What the folktales leave out is that the angel can only teach what is known to itself at that moment in time; there is a profound limit to righteous power. The child inherits a knowledge that is historically conditioned and tied to the realities of their own past and the generations before them. The dialectic at play only takes shape when one realizes that life is experienced in a way distinctly at odds with intuition.
Imagine a body. Atop that body sits a head positioned such that its face looks behind it. This body will march forwards, but only perceive objects it has already passed. For much of its life the body will stumble; it will trip over obstacles it can only discover post hoc. The only hope for the body is to construct a looking glass: a mirror which, when bent at the right angle, will reveal the safest path forward. For the soothsayers the device was the Scripture. The philosophers constructed the Subject. The fascists summoned the Nation. The communists were the only group to succeed in crafting a clear enough apparatus, that of historical materialism, but they could not escape the long, dampening finger of the angel of knowledge who forced the believers to forget the advances they had made. It is the task of humanity to inherit the task of the child: we must relearn what we had once known in the past but have long since forgotten.