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?

On How I am Living in a Different City Than My Students part 3

Note, Part 2 is below and should be read first.

4. Sometimes it is not the place you see, but the way you see it that makes all the difference. One day on my way home from the school, I took a different route and came across and artist’s shop. They had a small, inexpensive watercolor kit that was nevertheless of really high quality. I bought it and some paper with the goal of painting some of my favorite spots in Berlin. So far, weather and schedules have conspired to limit my excursions to just two, the first of which ended in such a total disaster that I never got past the sketch before giving up in despair. My second attempt, however, was much better. On Pfingsten , the day of Pentecost, which is a holiday in Germany, I sat down on a bench at the Gendarmenmarkt, resolved to get my money’s worth out of my paints. I carefully but roughly sketched out the Französische Kirche, which is one of two matching churches facing one another across the square. I pulled out my paints and prepared my brushes, then I began to paint. In the center of the square was a man with a violin accompanied by a woman on a keyboard. They played Mozart and Vivaldi, but also Elvis and the blues. When they played Schubert’s Ave Maria, however, a group of Italian tourists spontaneously broke into chorus and gave perhaps the most beautiful impromptu concerts I have ever heard. The sun was warm, the air pleasantly cool and I was able to concentrate on the neoclassical details of the church on my paper and soak in the music, absorbed in the experience. I painted and listened to conversations around me, amused as some would come up behind me and watch me work for a while. When one father tried to take a picture of his family, I volunteered to take it for him so he could be in the picture with them. “Yes, thank you,” he replied in German, “and from an artist, no less.” As I was finishing up, a woman, sitting on the next bench, asked if I had painted all of the architecture of Berlin. I had to admit that it was the first time in ten years that I held a brush in nearly ten years. My results were far from what I would call art, and show, I think, just how long it has been since I tried to paint. But for me the experience may have been the highlight of my stay in Berlin.

5. Some of my tour stops are about exploring memories from past stays in Berlin. During my second week in Berlin I went down to the Botanical Garden in Dahlem. One of my students and some of his friends tagged along. There are times when living in the city can be too much. Too much noise, too much traffic, too much of people everywhere. Places like the Botanical garden are perfect for escaping for a while.



We walked around the gardens for an hour or two while I tried to keep up with Harmony at flower photography, while the students called me “professor” in British and Swedish accents, and tried to find German words that I didn’t know (a Wachtel is a quail). When they were tired, they went on their way and I stayed behind for my own tour of Dahem. The Freie Universität is in this area, which is where I spent most of my time in 2001 and 2002 while I was working on my dissertation. I really like Dahlem. It is quiet, classy, and peaceful. We had expatriate friends that lived up the street from the University. Their house was large and luxurious–a perk from his company for living abroad. As I walked past, I saw a placard on their front gate announcing I was now standing in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Berlin, and I tried to imagine how the interior must have changed from the lego-strewn, love-filled place that I had known seven years ago.

At the university, whenever I was tired, I would come out of the library and watch the construction of the new library being built. It seems everywhere I go, someone wants to build a new one, but they only finish when I leave. I walked in and had the eerie feeling of deja vu for a place I had only ever seen in architect’s drawings. I wandered around, taking pictures, and looking for the Celan collection I had spent so much time working with in the old library.

6. From the library I crossed the street and walked to a nearby park. One of the things I like about Berlin is the endless possibility of finding little hidden spaces that come upon you unexpectedly. They can be like the Stasi exhibit I found across the street from my current apartment, or a statue entitled “Phoenix” I found once when I took a different way home, or they can be like this garden park. On this occasion I knew what to expect, since I had found this space years ago. In the middle of the park there is a small pond where ducks and other birds will gather. It is off the road and surrounded by enough trees that it creates a satisfying sense of isolation when one sits on its banks. I would come to this place whenever the library became too oppressive or whenever I needed to think clearly. If I brought a writing pad with me, I often got some of my best writing done. Usually however, I just came to sit and think. And that is what I did this time. Under a willow tree next to the water I sat and remembered my year in this place: about the freedom I felt at not being tied to the Army, the freedom to work on a project with relatively few distractions, the freedom to reacquaint myself with a country I already loved.
Sitting next to the water I also remembered the difficulties of that year. I remembered the guilt I felt at what I was putting my wife through. Being in a foreign country with the responsibility of dealing with two young children contributed to a spiral of depression that made my wife’s experience very different to my own. It altered her personality and put a strain on our relationship as difficult as any we have ever experienced. I sat at that pond seven years ago and missed my wife. I missed the wife I had married and wanted her back. So I sat and wrote about all the things I wanted to change and about the guilt I was feeling at what I was putting her through and about my anger and frustration that her difficulties were affecting what was supposed to be a perfect year. I wrote about the guilt I felt over that anger. Mostly I wrote about how I missed my wife and wanted her back. Then I folded the paper with my thoughts on it into a paper boat and set it out on the water. I sat and watched as the ink bled into the water, washing the words away as the boat slowly became water logged, then fell apart and drifted below the surface.

Memories of that day seven years ago color the experience this time too as I wonder why it is that my time in Germany is always tempered by the costs that coming here have one the one I care for the most. Once again I miss her and feel guilt over what I put her through as I set sail again in the hidden places of Berlin.