I have a book that I have been writing for years and probably will never finish, but it is loosely titled, “Philosophers That Messed Me Up.” I have a collection of notes that I have taken on various readings throughout the course of my life that really twisted me up and forced me to look at the world and things around me differently. For this article – I will share one of them. Walter Benjamin.
I have no idea where, to begin with this one. Walter Benjamin was a Jewish German who was born in 1892 and died in 1940. He was one of the many Jews who escaped to France and was facing potential extradition back to Germany. He died from suicide from a morphine overdose while trying to escape on the French-Spanish border. If you watch the Netflix show Transatlantic, you can get a feel for what the last days of his life might have been like. There is some debate about the intent and meaning behind some of his writings; above all, it seems to me that he was a critic of extremism, which seems rather topical nowadays. Was he a Marxist? Was he for or against religion? Was he for or against advances in science? Hard to answer any of these questions – one thing clear to me is that he was definitely critical of any hidden and obfuscated agenda by anyone in power.
I suppose the best place for me to start is where I ran into this philosopher. In the 1980s, for which I was a certified member of that era, the band UB40 released many albums. Although I largely did not like much of the music of the 80s, the reggae and ska movement was a place where I could find some refuge. Now that I am older, I listen back to the 80s music that I missed while I had my head being filled (literally) with the ballads of 70s rock bands and realize that I might have judged too harshly. Anyway, I did buy a few 80s albums, and UB40 was included in my collection. There first album was called Signing Off and was an interesting commentary about the worldwide unemployment going on at the time. They named themselves after the form that you filled out to make a claim for unemployment benefits.
Anyway, in 1988, I bought several albums. These were the last few years of high school for me, and music was just as much a part of my life as anyone else. I was intrigued by lyrics, mostly poetry. Recently, I went on a historical dig in my garage and unearthed many of my “CDs” from that time. My fascination with people speaking their voices through song was evident. Here is the list of 1988 albums in my collection from that year:
- It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back – Public Enemy
- By All Means Necessary – Boogie Down Productions
- Straight Outta Compton – N.W.A.
- Power – Ice T
- Colors – Soundtrack
- So Far, So Good…So What! – Megadeth
- Never Die Young – James Taylor
- Blow Up Your Video – AC/DC
- Now and Zen – Robert Plant
- Crossroads – Eric Clapton
- If You Can’t Lick ‘Em – Lick ‘Em – Ted Nugent
- Conscious Party – Ziggy Marley
- The Innocents – Erasure
- Vivid – Living Colour
- Down in the Groove – Bob Dylan
- Delicate Sound of Thunder – Pink Floyd
- G N’ R Lies – Guns N’ Roses
- Greatest Hits – Fleetwood Mac
- Almost Acoustic – Jerry Garcia
- UB40 – UB40
Please do not judge me. I have no idea how an Erasure album ended up in my collection. Must have been a momentary lapse of reason, perhaps? I also do not really think this collection is the best representation of lyrical genius – so spare the commentary about Ted Nugent and Megadeth. Anyway, getting to the point of this article – we will focus on the last one, UB40.
Inside this album, as I am opening it right now, there are various images. The art cover is of various portrait styles intentionally designed to look nostalgic. The inside cover explains this as surrogate memorial heads and lists the historical inspirations for each image. These are anonymous and done by the artist Stephen Masterson. There is an interesting observation about signatures, which the band included a few and one looks like the artists. Perhaps this is their signatory album? The back of the album is a fun picture of the band with interesting coloring. Somebody had fun with Photoshop, which coincidently was created for the first time in 1987.
However, here is the point. A quote from Walter Benjamin’s essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which he wrote the year he died, is inserted in the album. The particular reference is a commentary that Benjamin was making on “The Angelus Novus,” a painting by Paul Klee, who was a Swiss-German artist in 1920. The image included in this article is that very painting. Benjamin bought a print of this in 1921 and was friends with Klee. Here is the full quote from the essay:
“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 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 in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a 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.”
This quote, included in this album cover, was earth-shattering to me and sent me off looking for and eventually discovering some translated copies of Walter Benjamin’s writings. I am not sure that he intended this, but this concept caught an emotion that had been building in me for some time. As I learned from his essays, the ones that win are the ones that get to write history. I immediately became suspicious of what had been presented to me as truth in school, what was being shown to me in the media, and what my perceptions of the reality of the world really were. This combined with an ache that I had in my heart, one that was constantly worried about this existential question.
When we die, religious or not, we are going to take nothing with us. No wealth, no fame, and no ability to influence at all the memories of the people who we leave behind. They will interpret your life and actions how they will, and once you leave this earth, there is nothing you can do about it. I was at the age where I had seen some great-grandparents pass away and were worried that others would soon follow. I wanted, so desperately, to capture what I could before it was all gone – forever. Yet progress was pushing me rapidly ahead as I looked back upon the lives of my ancestors. Hoping that I might, if possible, grab some notion, some memory, something of value that I could cherish and help others remember.
The reason I bring this up today? Well, I bought a NAS (Network Attached Storage) for my personal home network because my archive of images, pictures, videos, journals, and other artifacts of my family has grown so large that I needed a storage upgrade. I am using the cloud, but as they say, three copies, two on different media and one off-site. This angel of history is not giving up; I will fight until the day I die to force the generations to follow – to remember where they came from, who their people were, and what was important to them at the time.
Thanks a lot, Mr. Benjamin, for dooming me to a lifetime of exasperation and an impossible quest. I know that I would really like to wake a few of the dead myself if I could. I would love to have a kitchen table debate with Warren, a good long-belly laugh with Grandma Tiger, and perhaps to meet the man that I resemble the most but have never met.
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