Being attacked by a Slab of Words

On Some Motifs in Baudelaire Illuminations Walter Benjamin

IV

Benjamin takes anxiety, memory, urbanity, consciousness, and creativity together and places all these within Baudelaire's poetry. Starting with the theme of consciousness being at odds with memory and experience we consider the role of a poet.

The euphemised poet quoted here screams before he is battered causing us to think his art causes him to flirt with the processes we have to keep intense experiences away from ourselves and causing us to be overwhelmed by the world we live in.

One of the mechanisms Benjamin gives is pinning traumatizing events to a point in time. But at what time does a poem take place? Poems do have measurments in rhythm and feet but even Baudelaire fantasied about a rhythmless prose that still read like poetry. Here Benjamin might pin these meters of poetry as dubious like the faces in a crowd of some busy part of a city.

The attempt to bring beauty in a work of art can hold many assumptions. It can be alluded to nature and it's foreign but self-generating beauty. But when it falls into the city and cultivation it takes on a ghostly dress and a necklace that is heavy on the neck. Nature seems comfortable when we don't know it well. It in fact seems bizarre and extraordinary to have a profound understanding of it. But when the unconscious is married to city life we are sceptical about all the strangers we have around us.

Isreal of Rizhyn Tales of the Hasidim Later Masters Martin Buber

The right kind of Alter

So far these tales of Hasidim reflect people who do action and turn their attention to god. It is a collection of modesty and listening to this intense urge that informs our actions. This is an interesting combination as this can be a recipe for tragedy but I guess these rabbi's piousness is unusual and they are celebrated because they can follow both morality and muse.

In this short tale there is an aversion to craft or taking something and monkeying with it. The first example is strange request by god to use an alter out of unchiselled stone. This almost seems to imply that God of the nature of stone, which is timeless but inert which doesn't seem right.

Then the request seems to fall in place as the table made of stone conflates with words that seem to be called to a person from above. It illustrates their relationship to the intellect being not as acute as say a brilliant philosopher but simple and shrouded with mystery that should not be expounded on. A philosopher might go further but at the expense of evaporating the religious experience and put God to the guillotine and examine his head. But in this light both options seem dubious--either being ignorant or being soulless.