The Singing Pastry

On Some Motifs in Baudelaire Illuminations Walter Benjamin

II

This passage deals with the past and how we recollect it. It calls into mind whether this process is started by the intellect or by experiencing things in the present that activate something long ago. He brings into the discussion the philosopher Bergson and a writer who is influenced by him, Proust. There is also a familiar theme of the story teller and the journalist. Curiously enough there isn't any connection made here to Baudelaire or his poetry. We have almost forgotten the subject of the essay in part where Benjamin discusses memory.

Here we consider the past as something that is alien to us and how we reconnect with something we can not experience again. Proust was interested in his childhood and whether the something like a taste of a pastry can unlock memories of that taste as it was experienced in the past. The debate of whether it is a physical or intellectual thing is brought up but I'm not sure what Benjamin's preference is or how it relates to Baudelaire's poems celebrating sensual experiences.

The theme of newspapers bearing information so bright it causes us to wince again is called forth. He's interested in how newspaper articles are written about things that happen yet this activity of reading the article is so alien from the actual experience that it does not properly engage our mind as if we actually experience what is being written about. The story teller is more preferable to Benjamin who claims this figure relates experiences beyond information and places a human touch to a list of facts. Perhaps making it more decadent and delicious in it's absorption into memory.

I think it's important to consider the role in memory here as something that gets variated. It's role in recollection is necessary but how it is treated is different. A story teller celebrates it and makes it develop who they are. A journalist takes it for granted and treats it as an impersonal storage for a mass stamp of facts.

The Singers Imagines Philostratus

The singers are pastoral choir of beauty in harmony. Aphrodite is called in as woman who is ageing yet still beautiful like she was young. The blending of opposites in a way that is beautiful is a task that is delicate and there needs to be a constant retuning of all the notes to keep beauty from slipping into disorder.