Augenblicke auf der Museuminsel

Some years ago I wrote an essay for a presentation on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Augenblicke in Griechenland, which is a travelogue of the author’s visit to the Parthenon and the museum next to it. I was and am interested in his use of the word Augenblick, because for him, the idea represents a moment of pure clarity, or immediate experience, unfiltered by explanation, or language or symbol, but is a moment of pure presence. The word Augenblick itself is a bit elusive. In common usage, it means “moment,” or a short period of time. We might want to translate it as “in the blink of an eye.” but Blick means to see, or sight, or even better, the gaze, so that Augenblick is somehow the moment of the eye’s gaze–capturing an instant and holding almost as it were in a timeless eternity–but this is perhaps too melodramatic.
For Hofmannsthal, the moment can be overpowering. They are difficult to capture, impossible to hold, and unexpected when they happen. He has such an experience on the Acropolis as he encounters three Korai. Under their gaze he sees time and timelessness as a dizzying swirl that combines the eternal and the temporary all in the same object. The statues come to represent a world lost forever, even if preserved in the stone artifact.
I have always been captivated by his description, ever since I discovered it. His essay becomes an exercise in language–but not one of words, but of a language of stone. It is something more primal than the words we try to use, and I always had the feeling that even his descriptions never came close to his experience. I have not thought about his work in a few years now.
This week in the New Museum (new because it is only 150 years old) I had an experience that reminded me of Hofmannsthal’s Augenblick, and I think I came a step closer to understanding what he meant. There is in the museum a seated figure, carved from a reddish-brown stone. She dates to the 12. Egyptian dynasty, or around 1850 b.c. That makes her nearly 4000 years old. She sits with crossed arms and bare feet sticking out of a full length robe. In her hand she holds a cloth offering. Her gaze is straight ahead, eyes up, with a look of unspeakable calm on her face. The curators have presented her with dramatic lighting from above, highlighting facial features that are at once strong and yet delicate, almost vulnerable. Overall I see the tension between these two extremes of strength and vulnerability in the statue. The form is one that is repeated over the ages in countless works, both long before this one, and long afterward.
But when I saw it, I was overcome very nearly the same way as Hofmannsthal was. There are so many layers here. When you look at it, at her, it is both a woman and a statue. She confronts you, draws you in to her long-vanished world. I see the faith of the one who commissioned the work and presented it as an offering. Then I see the hopeful, resolute vulnerability of the figure herself, upright and resolved on the hard blank stone block. But here also is the hand of the sculptor, who formed her out of a formless block, and I think of the time that has passed since then and the perfect surface, almost unweathered by time, and I "see" all these people, and I am transported back into their world for just a moment and we connect–
But then words fail, just as it is impossible to recover that time in a single statue. I can’t explain what it was like. I tried to show my students that were there with me in the museum, but they just nodded their heads politely and let me professorize into the wind. I think some of them sort of get it, but then they just wander off.
Much later, when I finally flee the museum, overwhelmed by the impossibility of absorbing so much history in a single morning, I discover that my students have long since left. True, they had class they had to get to, and thus an excuse that I did not share, but I would not have noticed the time either way and would not have made it out in time. What are a few hours in the last 4000 years?

In which Geri and I Play a Game.

Last year when I was in Berlin, I was crossing Potsdamer Platz on my way to or from somewhere. On that day they were having a market, which is when various and random vendors set up tents on city squares and sell random wares, good food, and usually some kind of beer or Bratwurst as well. Walking through I noticed a vendor selling a beautifully carved chess set in what looked like a well constructed case with drawers to hold the pieces. It was only 25 Euro. The problem was, I was feeling poor that day, having just spent most of my liquid assets for tickets to a concert in the Philharmonie for me and my students. So I didn’t get the chess board. I felt bad, even though I already have several chess sets, and really display exactly none of them. And even though it was probably made in Poland or somewhere else in eastern Europe, I still like the idea of a chess set as a souvenir. A good one has beauty and function. When I told my dad about it, who also likes chess sets, even though he hasn’t played me since the first time I beat him, he told me I should have bought the board anyway if it were only 25 euro. I thought this was odd, since he is, if anything, even more conservative with his money than I am.

Which leads up to this year. When I took the students to Dresden, there is a market place near the Frauenkirche with all the typical shop tents and wooden huts set up – I had some roast rabbit and Rotkohl with klöße there that was amazing. I also saw a chess board with stone figures and a stone-inlaid playing surface. 25 Euro. So without thinking too long. I bought it. I broke it in at the train station on the way home by beating one of my students in its first game. I don’t like to brag, but I demolished him, sucking him into a gambit and then picking him apart piece by piece. I still don’t like to brag, because he wasn’t a bad player, – but the game wasn’t really that close.

So now the board sits in my room, and I have no one to play. So I have been playing myself–Geri’s game style. If I wait long enough between moves, the left half of my brain can’t remember what the right half was thinking, and it is a pretty fair fight. We can’t play for false teeth, since neither of us has any, just a few crowns we both share. Maybe the loser will have to buy the winner a chocolate bar. Winner chooses the flavor.
By the way, no stone lions were injured in the composition of this post, but 3 of the four stone horsemen have already left the game. My apologies to Ron Weasley.

Stuff happens when I am in Berlin

Stuff always seems to happen when I am in Berlin. As a missionary, I experienced the reunification of the two German republics first hand. I wasn’t here for the fall of the Berlin wall, but I took part in much of what came immediately after. I thought at the time I understood what was happening, but now I am not so sure. I know so much more now about the complexities of German history that much of what at the time seemed so black-and-white now takes on a rich texture of colors and patterns even as it fades into the past at the same time.

Ten years later I arrived in Berlin with my family in the shadow of 9/11 and the threat of a new war on terror. The expected bombs soon fell in Afganistan and soon thereafter the (from me) unexpected ones in Iraq.

In that year that everything changed for the United States I filtered it all through the BBC and the German newspapers. I still had trust in President Bush to do the right thing, and I am still not sure whether he did or not. Certainly nothing turned out as we expected it to. One could argue that the fall of the wall and the fall of the twin towers are related. The Soviet decline begins with their failure in Afghanistan, and caused Gorbachev to rethink the entire foreign policy of the Soviet Union. So Bin Laden was a product of the Cold War and that the Soviet pull-out of Afganistan and the later US failure to help the country stabilize in the resulting vacuum set the world down the path that put American soldiers in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Now another ten years have passed and I sit in the Goethe-Institute I read of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden and the new awakening of the Arab Spring. I am 40 instead of instead of 30 instead of 20 and I wonder what these events mean for the future. I no longer think that I can make sense of it the way I thought I could before.
As any president would, Obama is taking credit for the success of the operation against Bin Laden, but it appears that the groundwork that led up to the assault on his compound in Pakistan goes back to well before the begin of Obama’s presidency. The president has also taken some credit for the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere that the newspapers have been calling the “Arab Spring.” Yet I wonder how much of these changes would have been possible if it had not been for the US policies of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan in the decade leading up to today.

And yet another “yet,” it is clear that the Bush presidency and the US made countless mistakes and miscalculations in their foreign policy during the last ten years, and I wonder how much we have hindered the possible progress that could have been made in that time if we had not created so much animosity for the West over the last decade. Is it possible that change could have come quicker if we had left the muslim world alone, if they had left us alone? If we had reacted differently?