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?

You may not get it, but to me this is really funny

On what a stone has to say

When I was my son’s age, I discovered fantasy literature in the form of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien particularly captured my imagination with the utterly realistic world he created. The major contributing factor of this realism of course was Tolkien’s facility with language. Tolkien’s own love of languages, etymology, and literature infected me and played perhaps too great a role in my decision to study language–probably because my own love of reading blossomed in the midst of hobbits and elves on the fields and hills of Middle Earth.

Key to the hobbits’ adventures was a dwarvish map written in a runic script. The runes were a secret and magic script that led the way to treasure and dragons and access to the world learning outside the Shire. True to Tolkien’s own personality, each hobbit that leaves his home becomes in his own right a scholar of the land that adopts him, brining back the language, learning, and history of that land.

It was a pleasant surprise then, when I discovered in my courses on the history of the German language, that Tolkien’s dwarvish runes were not original to him, but borrowed from the nordic germanic tribes. For the Norsemen too, runes were possessed of a magic wielded only by the select few. I suppose the magic still holds, even if the secret is widely known: if you put something into writing, you call it into being, and therefore you gain power over it as you make it present again – re-presenting it – in the text. The Norse understood this in a way that we have forgotten.

When I went to Sweden this summer I hoped I would find some of these runes. They were often engraved into standing stones–like Stonehenge in England. The stones themselves had meaning both in the way they were arranged and in the act of erecting them. They stand, like the Norse ideal of manhood. Upright. Proud. Immovable. Strong. Timeless. They are Standhaft. When I see them, my own Viking heritage stirs. They represent all the things we cannot always be, but wish we were, and I wanted to find one for myself.

I had heard of prehistoric Norse cemetery that had been discovered south of Stockholm, and which happened to be within walking distance of my hostel. I set out to find this cemetery on a beautiful June morning; the sun was bright and the air fresh after the rain of the previous day. About a mile down the path I began to see a series of stone circles sticking up out of the forest floor. There were other geometric shapes as well, mostly triangles and quadratic figures. It was a curious experience. The stones themselves are ageless: unshaped by any hand, they seem as old as the earth itself. But at some point someone gathered them together and arranged them, and even this act is removed from me by over a thousand, maybe two thousand years. For all that time they have remained, unmoved, a more constant part of the environment than even the generations of trees that have sprung up and died around them. Their permanence served as a contrast to the transience of the human hands that placed them, and my distance from those people, despite the fact that I was standing on the very place where they must have stood long before. The signposts said they were grave markers, but if there was any significance to the layout of the stones, it remained unclear to me, except that their very placement gave the stones meaning. It set them apart so that they were no longer just stones, but a message–Remember us, even though we are gone, we were here. This was our place. We lived. We worked. We created. We were.

At the time I was only struck by the beauty of their extreme age and their stunning simplicity. I was also mildly disappointed that they lacked any runes–any writing to connect me to them. All these other meanings come to me as I sit and write about them months later, when I realize that they had much to say and indeed were able to say much despite their silence. But at the time I resigned myself to the fact that this was as close as I was going to get to Norse paganism and so I set of in search of the coast and the seagulls.

On my way to the airport, however, I made one final stop at the castle Gripsholm in Mariefeld. The afternoon was getting on, but the day was just as beautiful as it had begun. I knew nothing about the castle except that Kurt Tucholsky used to take his vacations there. However, as I walked around the castle, I was surprised to find these two rune stones standing in the courtyard. I do not know if they have always stood on this spot, or as I suspect, they were moved here by the builders of the castle. It doesn’t much matter to me either way. As I looked at them, I remembered the one with the snake’s head from pictures in my graduate classes. Between the unexpected surprise at discovering them and the delight at touching a thousand-year-old inscription (okay maybe only 900 years) it was the perfect end to my trip to Sweden.

At one time I could puzzle out the sound of the language on the stones from the runes, even if the language itself was beyond me. But now I can’t remember the value of most of the symbols. In English it reads this stone was set up by Tola in memory of her son, Harald. He was Ingvar the Far-traveled’s brother They fared like men far after gold and in the east gave the eagle food. They died southward in Serkland.” According to the marker next to the stone, “Giving the Eagle food” means they killed enemies, and the “Far Traveled’s” expedition to Serkland is mentioned in many other rune inscriptions. These rune stones are therefore Cenotaphs, grave markers erected in memory of one who died far away and whose body cannot be returned home. They represent an absence, a symbol of what is not there.

To me these rune stones and the standing stones that predate them become a metaphor for language. Words are symbols for ideas or objects that are not there. The words we use re-present an absence, and even though the sound or shape of a word is meaningless in itself, the use we put them to–the way we arrange them opens them to an infinite number of possible meanings.

The stones do nothing. They just “stand there.” They exist in the moment of nunc stans (Thank you Scott Abbott), of “standing now” in the present. Yet they carry with them a connotation of extreme age, of events long past, of the people who touched them and placed them and wrote upon them. The language of a good book or a good poem does the same thing for me. The words only exist as I read them–before that they were just marks on a page. But as my eyes pass over them, the words connect me to an author who is absent–sometimes long absent. Whatever other message they might bear, Their texts become a monument that says, remember me. I was here. This was my space. I worked. I lived. I created. I am.

Poetry and living life

Several years ago, one of my professors introduced me to a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called “Selige Sehnsucht.” (Maybe blessed yearning). It is one of the staples of German literary history and well known by most in German Studies.

Sag es niemand, nur den Weisen,
Weil die Menge gleich verhöhnet:
Das Lebendge will ich preisen,
Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.

In der Liebesnächte Kühlung,
Die dich zeugte, wo du zeugtest,
Überfällt dich fremde Fühlung,
Wenn die stille Kerze leuchtet.

Nicht mehr bleibest du umfangen
In der Finsternis Beschattung,
Und dich reißet neu Verlangen
Auf zu höherer Begattung.

Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig,
Kommst geflogen und gebannt,
Und zuletzt, des Lichts begierig,
Bist du Schmetterling verbrannt.

Und so lang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.

Once again my poor attempt at a translation. Sorry for the lack of rhyme and meter:

Blessed Yearning

Tell no one, only the wise,
For the masses will only mock:
That which lives I will praise,
That yearns for death in flames.

In the cool of the nights of love
That begat you, where you begat.
Falls over you the foreign feeling
When the silent candle shines.

No distance is too far,
Spellbound, you come flying,
And at last, covetous of the light
You, butterfly, are burned.

And as long as you cannot grasp that,
This: Die and Become!
You are but a dreary guest
on the darkened Earth.

There is far more in this poem than I can probably discuss at the moment. Obviously the final stanza makes a powerful statement for roll death plays in one’s life and in one’s existence. The butterfly’s flaming death suggests that it is not just death but the manner of death–the striving toward light–that brings meaning to life.

But the part that has always made me wonder was a claim by my professor that the Greek word for butterfly was psyche , a fact that I have had a hard time verifying, but that may be substantiated here. In Greek mythology (at least as we have this story handed down by the Romans–nothing is ever simple) Psyche is a mortal so beautiful that all the worshipers of Aphrodite have left the temples to go and worship Psyche. Angered, Aphrodite sends her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest thing possible. Instead, Eros pricks his own finger with the arrow intended for Psyche and falls in love with her. The two are married, but Eros refuses to appear in daylight, coming to her only at night. Her sisters, jealous of her happiness, convince Psyche to light a lantern and discover her husband’s identity. In response, Eros flees and Psyche is left heartbroken (and angry at her sisters). Eventually, Psyche must enter into Aphrodite’s service and perform a series of impossible tasks in order to win back her husband. In the last of these, she must descend into Hades and bring back a jar containing Persephone’s beauty. When she tries to partake of this beauty, however, she falls down, as if dead. In the end, Zeus intervenes, and she is reunited with Eros and becomes immortal with him as she joins the other deities.

On my recent trip to Germany, I ran into Psyche once or twice and it got me to thinking. In the Berlin museum of art, there is a statue in one of the stairwells of Pan consoling Psyche. It is hard to imagine the debaucherous Pan of having very pure intentions in his efforts. The statue is intensely sensuous and seeing it, I wanted to warn her against what the old goat had on his mind. But Psyche is more resourceful than one might think looking at her and I suspect that in the end her beauty (so often a stand in for goodness, a trope I have no desire to deconstruct at the moment--and excuse me for using the words deconstruct and trope in the same sentence) will save her again.

My second encounter was a family grouping outside the Zwinger in Dresden. Here, Psyche, Eros, and presumably Aphrodite appear to have reconciled and the happy end seems assured. I wonder at the placement of the statue and what the sculptor intended with his composition, but I like this one, too. There is also this representation that I found on the web that is intriging.

In both sculptures, Psyche’s butterfly wings are clearly visible, establishing the connection that I had wondered about earlier. The word “psyche” in Greek means breath or air and has by extension connotations of spirit and soul.

So in this context, the figure Psyche becomes a symbol for the longing of a mortal soul to be joined with the divine, and the efforts one will take, even if it means descending into death to do it. The more I learn of the story, the more impressed I am in Goethe’s ability to weave the various elements of it into his poem. For me there is something vividly mystical about the poem and the mythology in the idea that the soul, psyche, wants to be united with the heavens. At first reading, Goethe’s poem may seem to be a justification for suicide. But in reality, I think it is an appellation for life lived to it’s fullest, for a Thoreauean effort to suck the marrow out of life and live deeply and deliberately so that in the end, we will not discover that we have not lived at all.

On How I am Living in a Different City Than My Students Part 2

This is the last day of the study abroad program. I have mixed feeling about the effectiveness of it and on the experience that my students have had. I cannot say how good their experience has been. I just know that in many ways it has not been the same as mine. For at least a couple of weeks now I have felt like I am in limbo between being a tourist and being a resident of Berlin. While I enjoy seeing museums and grand buildings and the big sites of Berlin–they are after all what gives the city its character–the parts of Berlin that I really love are the hidden spaces that the tourists never see. My students, even when I try to describe the things that interested me during the week, can only star back, smile politely, and say “well, that sounds really nice.” Here are some of my tourist hotspots of Berlin, that I can recommend to almost no one. One spot or the other may be of interest to some, but I would be surprised to find someone who would want to be with me for the whole tour.

1. Being the bookworm that I am I like to find spots related to the things I have read. No one else seems to get this, which is fine, as I have found these spots are best visited in the privacy of my own literary geekiness. While my parents were doing the Sound of Music tour in Salsburg, I climbed the Mönchberg in the center of town, looking for the spot where Peter Handke’s alter ego threw the body of the nazi grafitiist over the edge. In Leipzig I thought it was cool to eat lunch in Goethe’s old college dive, the Ratskeller, which figures prominently in Faust . Last week in Berlin, I went to the short end of the Sonnenallee. The novel Am kurzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, by Thomas Brüssig, is about a young man who grows up on this street, the last 200 meters of which happen to be on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. A few years ago they made a film about it, which was showing on Alexanderplatz the first weekend I was here. The other day I found the Sonnenallee on my map and decided to go visit. I couldn’t get anyone to come along. Probably just as well. The street looks very different to what it did 20 years ago, I am sure, but the wall zone has been turned into a nature preserve. It was green and beautiful. The trees, which have to have grown since the fall of the wall, were surprisingly tall. There was a marker showing where the wall went through, and a brief placard that verified the spot I was seeking.

2. In a final effort to bring culture to my students, I dragged as many of them as I could to a production of Iphiginia auf Tauris by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The play tells of the last generation of the line of Tantalus, the son of Zeus and one of his mortal flusies, who, in an effort to impress the gods, cuts up his son, puts him on the broiler, and serves him to the entire company on Olympus. It did not go over well, and he is punished by being placed neck-deep in a pool of water. Only, every time he gets thirsty, the water recedes to just below his reach. When he gets hungry and reaches for the fruit just over his head, a wind will blow that just out of reach too. Hence the meaning of something being tantalizingly close. Anyway, the generations between Tantalus and Iphiginia are similarly laced with tales of sex, incest, violence and revenge. Iphiginia in the play is in the land of Tauris, near the Black sea. Diana has taken her there because her father, Agamemnon, tried to sacrifice her to Diana to gain favorable winds as he leads the Greek armies in the Trojan war. Iphiginia’s brother, Orestes, is being hounded by Furies (harpy-like vengeful spirits) because he killed their mother, who had in turn killed Agamemnon because she was having an affair with Agamemnon’s uncle.

Out of this family soap opera Goethe makes Iphiginia to the height of Greek civilization and culture. Through her grace she is able to tame the barbaric (in comparison to her own family?) King Thoas, and cure her tormented brother of his insanity. The play is a discourse on enlightenment, western civilization, and ethics. Very deep and interesting topics. The catch? There is absolutely no action in the play whatsoever. Pure talking heads. While I could appreciate the subtleties after having read the play a few times, I am certain that my students could not. Oh well, what are five more people in the world turned off to the German classics? For me, however, it was fulfilling a wish I have had for a very long time to see one of the German classics produced on a German stage. I will do it again every chance I get.

3. For my kids I took a side trip down to Lichtenrade and the Föttingerzeile where we lived while I was on Fulbright. Behind our apartment there is a sandy playground with a slide that my oldest son used to scare us with by climbing clear to the top. He was two at the time, so it was a pretty big accomplishment, and would have been a long way to fall had he slipped. I took some pictures of the park and the apartment, trying my best not to look like a terrorist or a voyeur as I did so, then I sat down and remembered what it was like to live there. I thought of the friends we made, of rushing with the baby stroller and kiddy board on Sunday mornings, trying to make the bus to church. I thought of my wife’s efforts to make the best of the situation, even though she was often alone with the kids, with little contact with family and friends at home. I think, despite some of the hard days, we both have fond memories of that apartment and that corner of Berlin.

Around the corner from our house, back on the main road, I found a bookstore that wasn’t there seven years ago. It was small and as one might expect, filled comfortably to the rafters with books. After looking around for a few minutes, leafing through a number of books, I found the new work by Daniel Kehlmann called Ruhm (fame) I picked it up and asked the woman running the store if she had read it or his other, more famous work Die Vermessung der Welt. She had read Vermessung but not this one. We talked for a moment about Kehlmann, about other authors we had both read, and about living in Lichtenrade and her new store. It is a rare thing to find a Salesperson in a bookstore that is also willing to converse about the books she is selling and that knows her way around the literature as she did. For me it was one of the best finds so far on this trip, and it is perhaps fortunate both that her shop opened after we left from Fulbright and that it is far from where I am currently living, since my luggage would have been and would be significantly heavier than it was and is if I could visit her shop more often.