Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We are at home then in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks bored and gray within his sheath. And when he later wakes and wants to tell of what he dreamed, he communicates by and large only this boredom. For who would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of time to the outside? Yet to narrate dreams signifies nothing else. And in no other way can one deal with the arcades -- structures in which we relive, as in a dream, the life of our parents and grandparents, as the embryo in the womb relives the life of animals. Existence in these spaces flows then without accent like the events in dreams. Flanerie is the rhythmics of this slumber. In 1839, a rage for tortoises overcame Paris. One can well imagine the elegant set mimicking the pace of this creature more easily in the arcades than on the boulevards. [D2a,1]
Benjamin was born 'under the sign of saturn' (something Sontag reminded us of): "I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays", he writes. The slow tortoise's path of the saturnine was Benjamin's path. I thought that this photograph of Proust (above) was somewhat Saturnine as well, and also like Durer's Melancholia. Proust, head in hand, adopts the pose of one who is almost too weak to stand, too weak to do anything, really, consumed by ennui and the burden of the dreamer. Similarly, Sontag -- who said that we have to begin with photographs of the man, because that's all we have, given the absence of the thing itself -- says that Benjamin has the "soft, daydreamer's gaze of the myopic":
Like Benjamin, Proust was a dreamer. And the lining of the dream world is boredom. I like this passage from Illuminations:
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience [Erfahrung]. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places -- the activities that are intimately associated with boredom -- are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well.
Boredom has this positive side for Benjamin, that it opened a space for critical reflection, a space of half-buried memories and revolutionary possibilities.
Another thing: Proust, like Benjamin, was lacking in practical skill. As Jacques Riviere humorously commented, "Marcel Proust died of the same inexperience as enabled him to write his work [...] He died because he did not know how to light a fire or open a window". I have to say, Natalie, that I think Proust would be incapable of running a paper route! The paper boy/girl must always move at a quick pace along a linear path, and their movement is entirely goal oriented. Benjamin and Proust on the other hand always moved backwards (Benjamin's famous indictment of historical progress and linearity comes to mind, but so does Proust's embrace of the past, of course). Always turning back, they were like Lot's wife, turned to pillars of salt, or at least turned into tortoises, embracing the slow, sauntering path of remembrance.
Benjamin's mention of "inversion" in the discussion of the dreamer is also fascinating and was actually what I intended originally to draw your attention to with that quote above, but I seem to have gotten distracted -- the saturnine path of "detours and delays", I suppose, might take me back to inversion at some point but for now I'll leave it at that.
-DG
Interesting post and actually, right on the mark, I'd say. I am fascinated by Jacques Riviere's quip that, "Marcel Proust died of the same inexperience as enabled him to write his work [...] He died because he did not know how to light a fire or open a window". It reminds me of the following quotation from Marcel (_The Guermantes' Way_) which describes the situation of a sick man spilling scalding milk on himself:
ReplyDelete"...should the sick man not have been quick enough in taking the necessary precautions, presently, his drowned books and watch scarcely emerging from the milky tidal wave, he will be obliged to call the old nurse, who, for all that he is an eminent statesman or a famous writer, will tell him that he has no more sense than a child of five."
It is interesting to see how handicapped illness makes someone, according to Marcel. But why does he always beat around the bush. He's trying to make me understand the shortcomings of the ill, but what is the illness? Is it illness in general? He never lets us in on the symptoms or the pain.