Course:Angelus Novus (1920) by Paul Klee
CW: Suicide
In the spring of 2022, specifically in March I woke up, perhaps too late in the day, to the news that a friend had ended their lives. Our friendship was brief or just starting and I have some doubts that either of us would have strictly labelled the other as a friend per se. Not for lack of affinity or taste for one another rather it was just a budding friendship and within the context of Cairo social politics, a friend is rather a complex and heavy thing to weigh on something. Regardless, I came to learn that beyond the game nights at our beloved close friend and assumed shared politics and values I came to learn more about our affiliations and commonalities. Specifically our shared trauma, that was actually assumed being part of the Tahrir Revolution generation, but also our shared life (struggle?) with mental health.
After her death a friend of a colleague of hers published an article in the obituary section of the Egyptian Independent online editorial Mada Masr. The article involved an email correspondence between them titled "A New Tradition of Care"
"I finally decided to take the initiative and see how you feel about this when I was reading a text by Walter Benjamin for class. In the text, called “Illuminations” in a chapter called “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” I came across this:
“A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. 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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This 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.”
I read this and my heart stopped."
Oddly enough it is the writing on the essay by Benjamin that proceeded to haunt me onwards after reading this. As it does now more than ever. So much that it inspired the introduction to a long essay I submitted (incomplete) to the 505P Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction course. What does it mean to produce work while the world is ending? What does it mean not to? How can we, and here I mean "I", ask of ourselves to write, learn and practice while so many terrible happenings are occurring around the world? Not the world but right at the border of the country I just came from. Even as the genocide, queerness, racism and personal history came to life in my writing through this course and others the lingering feeling that "it is not enough" is more the overwhelming. It feels understated no matter how much I try to state that. "The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed." lingers with so much truth. What if ending the suffering is not enough? What would the angel of history have us do? In her correspondence she writes:
"and it seems this is a time when we are all, the lost souls, ten years later, and after more than a year of the world slowing down because of Covid-19, are awakening to this realization. Can we make sense of ourselves in separation from this “moment.” For those who were there, can there be a life, an existence, being in the world that is not haunted by 2011? None of us had answers, maybe hopes to figure things out but that was it."
I recall at the beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic my therapist reminding me how much I worried about the world always moving so far ahead. How now that the world "stopped" this could be my chance to "catch up" or even better give myself the break that I deserve. Yet even then when broad statements like "the world will never be the same again" and "the earth is breathing" were paraded around online news outlets and social media posts I knew this to be a ruse. That this stoppage is merely like the 5 days truce, just enough time for some Black Friday shopping (did anyone really care about the amazon employees then?) so the bombing can start once again.
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