Twenty-Two Stories on Some Lines from Ben Lerner’s ‘The Lichtenberg Figures’

A Dream of Adorno

1 Burning Snow
2 Dust from the firmament “like snow”
3 Snow crystals (twenty-seven suborders)
4 Snow slush
5 Cheeks “like snow”
6 Angel hair (in autumn)
7 The snow of DARK ENERGY
8 Unknown
9 Matter’s microstructure

 

“Reliable reports of burning snow”

The highest hierarchy of the crystalline sky begins just beyond the orbit of the fifty-second Aristotelian planet. This part of the cosmos already belongs to the INVISIBLE HORIZON. Isidore of Seville, who describes it, never saw snow himself. Nor does he claim to know the creatures of flame, the six-winged, eyeless beings that make up the order of the seraphim. He speaks of his ears and of voices. “The hearsay of his inner voices” is his source. Arabian doctors regarded him as insane. The crystalline structure he calls snow, ­mingling with the burning glow in which the angels of the First Order gather around God’s throne, is dust, scoured by the hour and the minute, as though with a divine scraper, from the flat plateau of the spiritual body we call the sky, like an animal grooming itself.

N. Goncharova asks whether this snow, in its bizarre figurations, is identical with the elaborately formed ice crystals and tiny cold blocks that cover the expanses of Russia. For the events occurring beyond the INVISIBLE HORIZON in the cosmos up above actually mirror the ethereal currents ­within us plants and animals. This strict ABOVE and BELOW keeps the chill and the fire far enough apart that we can live in the space between. Thirty-seven seraphim were needed in Chemnitz to sustain a little girl who had fallen seven yards from a window, enabling her to wake from the coma ­unscathed. In their ­remaining time, they work on an imaginary pyramid that, in truth, is a tree or a tower. It is only because they are so busy, manifesting dispersed throughout the world with their forces, that their fire does not ­utterly consume us. Burning snow is self-sufficient. It needs no influx of energy or substance. Yet the seraphim themselves have no organs of sight. Rather, they rely on spiritual beings below them in the hierarchy who have eyes on their wings and tell the seraphim the origins of the noises whose transformation into the sound of the heavens gives life to the highest order of angels.

Macrotime, Microtime

One Hubble time is approx. fourteen billion years.
It will take ten thousand Hubble times for the physical world’s last light-producing bodies to burn to ash.
The balance wheel, the beat that moves the world, that is, the crystalline sky, is independent of these time scales.
The excited state of an atom lasts 10^-15 seconds.
The beat of the music of the heavens in the first moments of the universe had a frequency of 10^-43 seconds.

“The movement of the angels over a given expanse of snow relates to actualities other than those of the present”

Every winter, three great surges of snowfall level the slopes and valleys ­between the Ural Mountains and Siberia’s broad expanses to form a flat, ideal plane. On this terrain, where little concerning humans occurs, the spiritualist M. Larionov observed, within a small space, a surprisingly lively traffic of angels. This traffic resembled a conference. The “angels’ feet” leave no traces visible to the eye; rather, the spiritualist can detect them by the minimal distortions they cause in the crystal lattices of the snow stars. What happened here? The habits of these messengers, all of them PRINCIPALITIES of the Seventh Order, that is, the sort of SPIRITUAL DIGNITARIES otherwise found only on battlefields or at the collision of massive continents, have, according to the spiritualist, become uncoupled over the course of the millennia from human affairs and from the nature of the planet. The six-winged beings move approximately two inches above the ground and imbue all that lies below them with a bizarre, fixed structure, “as though a magnet were passed over iron filings.” Larionov claims that these bizarre structures, never seen by ­human eyes, have great artistic value. But it is impossible to pick up a piece of this snowy expanse from the ground and take it to Sotheby’s in London to convert this value into money.
 

 

A human life, compared with snow

A human life spans the time in which the starlike snow crystals trodden on by an angel of the Fifth Order turn to slush and melt. It is a misconception that the ARCHAI or RULERS are responsible for guarding human lives. If this is seen as their work, it is due to a confusion with heathen images of Valkyries or divine illuminations from Asia that watch over heroes. However, there are FORCES or STRONGHOLDS, dynameis in Greek, that guard complex entities, such as human children until their ninth year. These forces always manifest themselves in groups, in formations. Conversely, this means that they are lacking in other places and in other perilous moments. A gas chamber is put into operation and no choir of angels blocks the pipeline. To confuse these beings with ELECTRICAL FORCES is equally far-fetched. During the Enlightenment, scholars interpreted spiritual beings in physical terms, just as visitors to a zoo contemplating a monkey cage assume they understand something about these beings by memorizing the textbooks about them and the anatomical atlas.  

 

“And the mountain’s highest nymphs as well / enjoy the light snow for a brief time”

In 1943, rambling on Mount Etna, Lieutenant Schirmacher, teacher, from the Hermann Göring Division, observed fleeting cloudlets of snow, so-called nymphs’ caps, pursued by witch hunters, that is, gusts of wind from the north. Hunted and carved to pieces. With his paratrooper boots, Schirmacher ­trampled these sanctimonious winds from the north. Nothing from antiquity, not even the nymphs of the mountains, was spared by these cruel Puritans. The officer shivered in the Africa uniform he had worn since the time of the victories in Libya. On this morning, he would have liked to help those patches of white, which he took for a residue of the ancient world. They had turned to water, and his boot heels were partly to blame. Should he have thrashed away with his belt? Shot harsh gusts of wind with his pistol? His presence up here, a calm contemplative moment amid the chaos of war, struck him as strangely gratuitous. Wherever he set foot, snow turned to a puddle of water.

Angels’ lives and ours. Between them the snowless dark ages.

In the Dark Ages of our universe, several million years after the earliest segment of time, which was 1-32 seconds long, a TIME OF ITS OWN and an ANGELS’ TIME constituting a separate and autonomous eon (for us such a moment is short, but on its own terms its duration is extraordinary, “subjectively infinite”), there is neither snow nor light. No child with a candle, its light flickering in the draft, crosses a cellar such as that.

This was before the unforgettable moment of gloaming, dawn, the first massive stars. Where were the angels then? The WHEELS or THRONES of the Third Order, with their winged pairs of eyes? They surged forward like snakes, like swimmers gone deep underwater, propelled by their lungs. It is said that this adversity gave rise to the spirits of the First and Second Orders. That explains why, according to the accounts, the first fallen angel came from the Third Order.

In the time preceding the Dark Ages, that is, within the beat of 1-32 seconds, the heavenly palaces turned infinitely small. Thus, to this day, the ­upper Six Orders of the angels are invisible to our eyes, and our ear detects them with difficulty in the rushing of the present. The choirs of the HIGHER SPIRITUALITIES are sopranos so high that our ears mistake them for shrieking. The singing beings are so submicroscopically small that they (or a flock of them) could pass through the head of an American president without him or his guards noticing a thing. If, however (and this is not individually commanded by God but happens spontaneously and ceaselessly), a messenger, in particular one from the Ninth Order, namely the practitioner of salvation, is sent to us, he must inflate himself monstrously like a balloon, an explosion, from his authentic microform to Planck length, almost to the boundaries of his true nature. It is in this attenuation, at the point of bursting, that he delivers his messages. The phantom hands seen on icons at these messengers’ sides, next to their wings, are deceptive. Angels cannot use their hands. They are not workers like bees. When introduced into our dimension, they remain VIBRATIONS or STRINGS, that is, rhythms or metronomes, and the drastic difference between the thousand types of beats at their disposal and the slow motion of our cells and nerves (= we human beings are bromides) engenders these messengers’ tidings and protection.

 

“Numbers leaning against their radicals”

The number beasts (numbers “dressed in animal skins”) support themselves with one hand on a torn-down oak. Holding them up against every wind are the roots of this tree. They point to the sky. The roots cannot nourish the tree this way. The number brothers, in turn, lack the strength to move the tree. It is hard work, you see, to bed the roots back in the ground.

 

Fallen stars are like fallen angels

Stars that collapse at the end of their lives enter a material state referred to by astrophysicists as “degenerate,” without any reference to racial prejudices. Nothing but neutrons, with no perceptible space in between. Such ALREADY EXTINCT SUNS are usually two stars revolving around each other. This death, extending over eons, takes place in each fraction of a second in which the two heavenly bodies orbit each other as a lingering sound, a distortion of time and space, like a musical note. This sort of heavenly trumpet costs a minimal amount of substance that then adds to itself endlessly. The late stars, those BIG TWO: falling together in an abundant well we call NOTHINGNESS. As Prof. Dr. Alessandra Buonanno put it, a crystalline sphere of ideal roundness. A massif of 1,889 Himalayas would present barely the irregularity of an ice rink freshly prepared for a skating competition. Underneath, these excessively compact bodies are liquid. Full of disobedience, saturated with congested agitation over the innumerability and indefinition of such a highly condensed mass. Here matter shows its true face. But no submarine can navigate the wild currents of this crystal lake. This predator mauls any stranger on the spot. There is nothing in the cosmos as lonely as these “I”s orbiting each other.

But fallen angels (they, too, circling in pairs, but not for reasons of sex) differ utterly from neutron stars in that their compactified vibration swarms in microparticles in us human beings and our evolutionary neighbors (and in Nature as a whole), taking the form, as it were, of stray waves of corpuscles on whose crests adventurers and the daughters of Amazons ride. That is often the reason for tears running down the cheek. A bit of dust from the once-so-compact body of one of those angels suffices.

On the other hand, all the vivid pictures of angels in human form are based on misconceptions. Evidently all angels are spheres. And bizarre, to the extent that they manifest as snow.

 

“Support your polis: chop the air” 

(You can’t stop breathing)

Nine weeks of downpours. Followed by a heat dome. The high-pressure system over the city shuts in the smog at roof height. Nose shut (you can shut it mentally by denying the stench), I bike the seven miles to my business meeting. Really I don’t want to go. I block this awareness by thinking it away. And so I task INTERNAL ORGANS more with warding off sensory impressions than with processing them. I ride along in a diving suit (imaginary), with an air hose (to all the arts of survival). With a butcher’s knife, I chop through the city air, dense as jungle thickets. I hope (instinctively, preemptively) not to arrive in the place the plan calls me to. 

 

“Squander the mind’s ultimate candela on the mimetic”

At the barber’s. He’ll make me young again. With short-trimmed hair I look as I did as a child. Came too early, have to wait. No one free yet to give me the wash before the haircut. Harper’s Bazaar. Seven straight pages of advertising. The first piece of editorial content: how a woman ought to wear her jewelry. The lips of the model on page 13 would fit the face of the solemn girl (a model advertising watches) on page 24. None of them can compete with the invisible image of a woman that I carry within me, that presumably I am myself. Again I glance at the lines of the model on page 64. The hair washer is already on her way. With tiny scalpels or magnets, the illustrations have extracted “reason” from me. That which props up the invisible image, like a construction of boards from which the orators speak. The inner image lies in disarray. A lost toy. Magda will find it. 

“Politically speaking, I’m kind of an animal”

Trotsky is speaking. Cooped up in trousers, jacket, the neatness of the suit, that’s how he meant to slip scot-free through Turkish customs. He is speaking to a group of eight people who have come to receive him. I keep calm. That’s what he’d say if he had to discuss his state of mind rather than the political situation. Calm does not suit my temperament. The animals within me—calm, snappish, patient, tempestuous—are inclined to mutiny.

Intoxication flows in my veins. My neurons still hold the thrill of the years that fled so swiftly.

And so I leave the steamship, pass through customs, walk through the throng of journalists, not saying a word to them. The faithful eight, off to the side now, are chewing on my words. I am led to a launch that takes me to one of the Princes Islands, in the evening Sea of Marmara. Here, where the Flood once surged, will be my abode, whatever that means, for nowhere do I abide, I am always “struggling.”

All this Trotsky said to himself, now in Russian, now in German, now in the etymological singsong of old Odessa. Great Russia, ill-advised, had chased him out of the country he had conquered from that sovereign.

He was not a fox. Perhaps a centaur. Possibly a constellation of different animals. When an animal is joined with a scholar, a child, a mechanic, a collector, a prophet (who speaks in tongues, six-winged), the result is a being of relative rarity. A “political language beast.” 

 

“From every single word which, wrongfully burned, awaits its arrival”

On New Year’s Eve, the papyri that had burned in the Library of Alexandria fifteen hundred years before, ghosts, that is, migrated northward at an ­unknown but astonishing speed and turned west outside Hildesheim. The knowledge contained within them, like the money that central banks drop over countries from helicopters to stimulate their commercial spirit, lay about in northwestern Europe for several days, absorbed by no one, and scattered in one last, energetic surge over the vast Atlantic. But no water can douse what burned long ago. Just as cisterns exist, so too there are hidden collecting tanks meant for such rare rains. What was misleading was not the report of the papyri’s migration, which according to skeptics was physically impossible, but rather the supposition that the papyri had vanished for good.

Did these, the resurrected, migrate all the way to Europe deep below the earth? Or did they fly vast distances in the upper wind? In the days after New Year’s Eve 1799, a flood of unexpected ideas (mostly music) reached people’s minds.

The “engraphs” quickly faded. Nowhere, after all, were they shored up with spiritual soil, watered as a planted garden should be. Did they wither? Did that indicate the “weak nature” of those aliens? Can RESURRECTED WRITINGS be compared with premature babies that were admitted to a clinic lacking the proper expertise (this one, for instance, specializes in ear complaints) and thus could not last in this world? The pious scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher, who knew a thing or two about it, even declared the “shepherds of souls” (that is, burned letters of the alphabet) to be ESPECIALLY robust. And so it is conceivable that some of what fell from the sky on New Year’s Eve 1799 (unlike meteors, which vaporize) has survived to this day and need only be gathered and harvested. Where? Using sections of the skin, the intestines, the liver, the inside of the heart (in cooperation with selected neurons) we must create a NEW HEAD amid the corridors of the OLD BRAIN and—like a two-headed eagle—set it next to the traditional head of reason, so that they may grind each other down to a sensitive dust, still engaged in the search for the lost letter, for the plants from Alexandria, which in the future, too, shall survive every fire, because they have always been burning. To absorb something of them is a function of the “author as producer” that is innate to every human being and that does not live from bread alone but from every single word which, wrongfully burned, awaits the end of its journey. 

 

“History pauses for emphasis” 

How to relate a circumstance of which you know nothing

How do I speak to the question of how, on the evening of December 31, 1799, “the twilight descended”? Is it poetically correct, faced with this moment of which I know nothing, for me to write what I imagine? Is it good for me to invent such a thing?

—Have you inquired whether there might be some diary entry, some contemporary remarks on the subject? Knowing, in any case, that during those twilight minutes Friedrich Schiller was proceeding in the direction of Goethe’s town house.

—Nothing positive could be ascertained. Various details of that New Year’s Day are documented. The hues of the heavens’ light toward evening: not at all. Then one should not invent anything. One should make a point of not knowing it. Wilhelm Voßkamp was known for his rigor. Following his advice, I arrived at the following phrasing:

It was due to collective impatience that the majority of the acute minds produced by the advancing eighteenth century moved forward the turn of the century, which by the calendar was not expected until the following year, to the night of December 31, 1799. They celebrated unprompted. Whether it rained toward evening or whether the sky was clear, so that our sister planet appeared in the west, I do not know. I phoned with Dr. Combrink, who looked around on the Internet. But I knew from previous research that no one, nowhere, knows what specifically met the eyes from five to seven in the evening on December 31, 1799. The excitement of that day may be one reason for the lack of observation. Nothing but generalities have come down to us about that hour. Sensory substance, which after all, far below the rational level, must have occupied the eyes and the feeling skin, was lost for good. So many senses—so little information.

I could have told now of the Alpine ridge and the road from Zurich to Chur, down which the army of the Russian general Suvorov marched. A few safe hypotheses would have sufficed, for the route, as far as cold, heights, and abysses are concerned, has gone nearly unchanged to this day; indeed, due to recent road construction, the old paths and Swiss-style roads off to the side have remained better preserved than if they were in permanent use. But for the emotions, the feelings of the Zurichers, the celebration held by Masséna’s victorious soldiers, the mood of the Asiatic horsemen who rode in Suvorov’s company, the sweat of the elite Russian gunners as they heaved their cannons up the road—there is no contemporary attention, no source. Only what I have thought up.

That was not significantly different in the seconds as the twentieth century passed into the twenty-first. Even as the media brought early reports of the fireworks in Sydney, speeches, news, news tickers were already flooding the monitors. It was not worth looking out the window yet because the ­local fireworks could not be expected until later. The main things, that was all. But whenever some lonely cyclist rode across the landscape to his house, no doubt noting the features of his surroundings, this impression was not reported, it remained private, a piece of news that would have been turned away by the doorman of the TV or radio studio. And so, not wanting to fall short of the precision of the early film pioneers, I noted that in the two centuries following December 31, 1799, the LACK OF SENSORY ATTENTION AT CRUCIAL MOMENTS, namely the lack of surface perception that we call ­superficiality, had not diminished. The reason for this, it seemed to me, was not that no one wrote anything down and that there was no archive; rather, it was an inherent weakness in our perception of the moment, a flaw in humanity that would be foreign to a live film camera. But it happened with one such camera, precisely on New Year’s Day 2000, that it (intended to film only the tumult of light at midnight) was turned on prematurely and then packed in its case, where it registered darkness all evening, and when it was required at midnight, its batteries were used up. Certain gray tones, however, filtered through the cracks of its protective case, conveyed the motion of the walking cameraman, the transportation. The incompletely shut, low-information container was documented exactly. The cameraman, a reality hunter, did not know what to do but deliver the exposed tape; it ended up in the archive of the television company, from which (along with all the filmmaker’s other ­materials) it was transferred to the Federal Archives as a cultural legacy, where to this day it provides inexact testimony as to the qualities of the leather of a twenty-first-century carrying case and the precise sensitivity to light and dark demonstrated by a twenty-first-century recording medium.

Back to the shifting hues in Weimar on the evening of December 31, 1799. The difference between the color of the sky in Alexandria, where with only two hours’ time difference the officers of the French expeditionary force ­celebrated the accentuated day, and the scattering of clouds far to the south of the Harz Mountains—such differences can be assumed and conceived for all imaginable weather conditions: as a prism, as a plethora of different possibilities that all the same can be pictured as precise in their difference. Such impressions link events that are scattered across the planet, independent of concrete knowledge; indeed, the less they are hampered by direct sensory impressions, the more opulently the kaleidoscope unfolds. This is worth conveying, and so I need not begin the first paragraph of my planned story about December 31, 1799 (I am still uncertain whether to set it in Weimar, Schwanebeck, or Halberstadt), the way I like to read it: “On a rainy day, Countess F. proceeded along the rue Saint-Honoré, swathed in thick clothing, toward a shop where, just the day before, in the sunshine, she had seen a thin, elegant gown . . . ” Rather, it is worth relating the fact that while Goethe and Schiller were looking forward to their evening ­together, preoccupied by countless plans for the new year, one hurrying, one waiting impatiently, Indios in the Andes are sure to have gazed up at a sky that was alien to Goethe and Schiller, and various Japanese who did not adhere to the Gregorian calendar ascribed no special significance whatsoever to that day.

As a child, my father had the habit of spitting on the presents and the cake set out in the morning for his birthday before he went to school so that his older sisters and his brother would not tamper with his property. Thus did the young doctor and archaeologist Dubois conceive of selectively claiming Africa for France by distributing attributes of civilization among the caravans that he thought would cross the continent.

“These are pieces of us.”

For undertakings of this sort, small French troops of seven men with little equipment sufficed. There was generosity in this plan. No differently had the Franks, barbarians that they were, occupied Gaul, and by turning up the dregs of society to the top as when plowing a field (i.e., making slaves their tender mistresses), transformed it into a garden of God; indeed, the garden itself transformed into this state for a lengthy time. This is one of the tales of New Year’s 1799.

 

An adventuresome band on New Year’s 1799

As twilight descended, the sixteen cuirassiers rode into the town of Timbuktu, led by their Arab guides. The animals were given a rubdown. How to seek quarters in an oasis town? Nothing could be done in these foreign parts without the help of locals. The sixteen gathered in a caravansary and immediately went about celebrating. A banquet was envisioned, its ceremony soon adapted to the ritual of a French dinner party. All to be developed NEW-OLD on the basis of elements in situ. Soon the SIXTEEN MEN IN ARMS, sufficiently sequestered from the locals, formed a rhapsodic, loquacious company. Revived from their exhaustion after the long ride. Revolutionaries, years ago.

A few love songs from the Loire. The sky outside the clay walls and the roof. A vague plan. Having advanced so far into the west of Africa, beyond the boundary of the Roman provinces, the idea of occupation lodged itself in their minds: revolutionizing Africa, that is, continuing on fresh terrain the revolt that had failed in Paris, terrain which, isolated in this building by the oasis and mindful of their unhelmeted heads, they pictured as “unpopulated.” We shall see. Half drunk already. Two guards outside, who ought to be changed at midnight. But who will still be willing and able to stand guard then? They set their hopes on the tolerance of the locals. Not to be cheated and not attacked. What good would their weapons, uniforms, and horses do them? Here they are merely scouts. In the new century, the New Year’s night of their intoxication, they woke unscathed, with throbbing heads. Rode the next day further west to the sea. They did this because their officer had told them of the cry of “Thálatta” reported by Xenophon. Absurdly underestimating the distances, they rode the stretch that can be covered in a day when one sits hungover in the saddle. 

 

Results of a rationalization gain in the Russian Revolution of 1917

In the course of one of the reforms that so rapidly stumbled over one ­another, ultimately bringing general literacy to Russia, the fact that here, in the Third Rome, letters of the alphabet had been used to designate numbers led to a certain confusion, indeed a loss with long ramifications. This “literacy campaign of impatience” cost great quantities of “aim,” of “soul.” Utopia, which had waited like a curious animal since the Middle Ages, was lost. But the worst of it was not the loss and the mix-up of the numbers. Letters that were hard to write and had no equivalents in the alphabets of Europe and the United States were dropped. Because these letters were rationalized away during the literacy campaign, in the end the number seven was missing, and nine ended up coming before five.

The rationalization gain came at a devastating cost, wrote Bukharin. Economically as well. Inflation got out of control. It profited from the ­inconsistency in number sequence and the fact that one of the numbers was missing. Sly peasants and small traders skipped the missing, unnamable number. And so the price rose from four to nine rubles, then from forty thousand to ninety thousand, then into the hundred thousands on tokens, postage stamps, and ration coupons. The accelerating factor that governed the precipitous advance of literacy had leapt over to a completely different area: value and countervalue.

 

The Scapegoat Principle

When the metropolises of the Orient were founded (Uruk, Babylon), people were crowded so closely together that aggression built up between them. Only the priests know how to achieve the proper balance in dealing with this “social fever”: from time to time a scapegoat, an innocent human being, must be publicly sacrificed. Afterward, the victim is canonized, preserving, for a brief time, the common good. Following the curtailment of the religions, according to the French thinker René Girard, this has become the subject of opera.

When one rationally questions the magical means by which the priests (and their operatic echoes) even out the balances and memorize them anew, these means lose their power. For this reason, Jürgen Habermas insists that a certain stock of religiosity—like a supply train—must be taken along on every march of the Enlightenment. 

 

A crucial character (among persons none of whom are who they think they are): Rachel in ‘La Juive’

One day, the costumes and the scenery burn up (towers, equipment for the cauldron of boiling oil into which Rachel is plunged). And so for several years the audience cannot watch La Juive. But the scenes have been burned indelibly into the eyes of the young Proust.

The tale concerns the biological daughter of a powerful Christian in Rome. He believes his daughter is dead. Neapolitan troops have started a fire. But a Jew rescues the child from the burning house. He calls her Rachel and raises her. Rachel is proud to be a Jew. In the finale of La Juive, she goes to her death. She would rather be pushed into the inferno than betray the faith of the man she trusts and takes for her father. “Let the skin peel from my bones.”  

 

The advantage of a relationship between 
two women (or between loyal men) as opposed 
to the caricature of man and woman. 
An observation of Proust’s.

Léopold, the high tenor in La Juive, is one of the emperor’s generals. He is married to Princess Eudoxie. And so he is committing adultery when he disguises himself as the Jew Samuel to “work” in Rachel’s father’s workshop and seduce her. In the end, he vanishes from the scene. A coward. The two rivals who love him, his wife and Rachel, join forces in solidarity to save the high tenor.  

 

The opera with two roles for high tenors. Explanation of the fanaticism of Éléazar, who sacrifices Rachel, on the basis of his high vocal range.

Éléazar, Rachel’s foster father, could easily save her in the fifth act. He need only tell Rachel’s biological father, the cardinal, that she is his daughter. There is nothing the cardinal, this SUPREME JUDGE OF THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE, longs for more than the return of the daughter he believes is lost forever.

When the cardinal meets Rachel, now condemned to death, in act 4, he seems to sense that he should protect her. Just as children at a puppet show warn the hero when the crocodile is sneaking up on him, the spectators at the grand opera want to call out to the characters and tell them their mistakes. Doom, a very thin garment. Salvation, nearly naked on the stage. In the following scene (the cardinal washes the Jew’s feet, humbling himself), Éléazar comes within an inch of telling the truth. Only the unwavering stance of the Parisian audience, holding that an opera can be regarded as serious only if no solution opens up in the fourth act, prevents the singers from embracing one another, from being friends and Enlightenment philosophers.

Another strict demand of the medium prohibits a duet between two basses (Éléazar and the cardinal). Thus Éléazar must be sung by a tenor. Singing in such a high range, the Jew lacks all sense of generosity. During the intermission, Proust spent a long time discussing this external constraint, which operates on the assumption that in the opera house it is not production but consumption—i.e., the spectators’ passive enjoyment—that is the “overarching element”: the finding of happiness. 

 

The heroine of the third volume of ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’

After the death of her husband Georges Bizet, Geneviève Halévy married the banker Straus from the Rothschild clan. The Jewish beauty kept a grand household in her domicile on the Champs-Élysées, built to resemble a noble palace. Her guest and childhood friend Marcel Proust turned her into the Duchess of Guermantes (with all the attributes of old French nobility). And so all the suffering inflicted upon the scapegoat Rachel in the opera La Juive (composed by Geneviève’s father) was compensated for by an illustrious identity for the daughter. A sovereign gesture, that is poetry. 

 

The sky stops painting and turns to criticism

Up above the mountains, where usually the sun would emerge from morning mists: now a row of silvery, glittering dots. Around them—as on so many other days in that same season—the sky turned color, according to witnesses, but always a little bit differently: gooseberry, virtuoso blue, flannel yellow, shimmering red, angel colored, hysteria white, rose mélange. And always an echo on the opposite, western horizon. Still in darkness, it replied to the splashes of light in the east.

The glut of color pierced the artifacts, as yet still tiny, the engine noise rushing on ahead of the apparition on high. As yet they were still dots. And already their noise (“the trumpet”), namely the expectation in advance, drew all the observers’ attention.

Twenty minutes later, the city was destroyed. Though it takes six or eight such raids to actually eradicate it—and even then nests of human spirit are still stirring, seeking to save themselves and establish themselves anew. The raid by the airplanes, this action by armed INDUSTRY, ENGINEER-CENTERED HEAVENLY POWER, contains a strong VEIN OF CRITICISM.

Question in the air-raid cellar: Where was the last junction for me and my children at which we could have escaped the doom that descends upon us from two miles in the air? Twenty years ago? Could I have escaped even yesterday? Where to run to? The knowledge of safe places is the beginning of philosophy.

A bomber squadron early in the morning in a sky of any color whatsoever creates a new foundation for thought. With which senses? To detect the enemy in the corner of the eye, from a tiny movement on the horizon, is too little. Neither the squadron above me nor the pounding heart within that tells me to jump up and run out of the cellar, which at this moment would mean certain death but a little later could mean salvation, is an “enemy on the horizon.” If I am lying on the cellar floor in 2016, the horizon, that is, the home of the enemy, in the year 1921 would presumably be in London and Paris, not in a Syrian town south of Aleppo.

If my body were made of steel and pliant as a young poplar, I could ­absorb the blow of the shrapnel that seeks to hit me. Thus do the CHANGING HEAVENS ABOVE criticize the body, the senses and the spirit, urgently ­demanding the novus homo, as last envisioned, in 1917, by the Biocosmists of the Russian Revolution. Where, brothers, are you now, in my hour of need? There was time enough to take up contact with you, but I was busy. I was trying to count the crystalline colors of the heavens. In our climes, the sky is a gifted painter in the morning and in the evening twilight. Several seconds before my end (and that of my loved ones)—and if it is my neighbor who is hit, then evermore into the future—I will be a critic crying to high heaven. I will suck at the teats of the she-wolf to fill myself with this panacea, if time is left me.

—Translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole